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VIEW ON THE AMERICAN BIVER-THE PLACE WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND.- 



GREATER BRITAIN. 



A BECORB OF TBAVEL 



IN 



ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES 



DURING 1866-7. 



BY 

CHAELES WEKT WORTH DILKE. 



TWO VOLUMES IN ONE. 

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 




PHILADELPHIA : 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO. 
I86 0. 



L-- r 










4/////j^jS' 



TO 



MY FATHER 

I f £ ij i nr 1 1 



THIS BOOK. 

C. W D. 



yl P BE FACE. 

Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon hum- 
bler grounds : the development of the England of Elizabeth 
is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the 
habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled 
"Great," America, Australia, India, must form a Greater 

Britain. 

C. W. D. 

76 Sloank Street, S. W. 
\at November f 1868. 



CONTENTS 



07 



THE FIRST VOLUME. 



PART I. 



CHAPTER 

I. VIRGINIA . . . . 

II. THE NEGRO 

III. THE SOUTH 

IV. THE EMPIRE STATE 

V. CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT 
VI. CANADA 
VII. UNIVERSITY OP MICHIGAN . 
VIII. THE PACIFIC RAILROAD . 
IX. OMPHALISM 
X. LETTER FROM DENVER . 
XI. RED INDIA 
Xn. COLORADO 
XITI. ROCKY MOUNTAINS 
XIV. BRIGHAM YOUNG . 
XV. MORMONDOM 
XVI. WESTERN EDITORS . 
XVII. UTAH . . , , 

XVIII. NAMELESS ALPS 
XIX. VIRGINIA CITY . 
XX. EL DORADO 



VAOI 

3 

16 

2T 

33 

43 

65 

69 

18 

86 

91 

102 

110 

115 

122 

121 

131 

144 

152 

166 

119 



(vii) 



viii CONTENTS, 

CHAPTER rAQl 

XXI. LYNCH LAW 190 

XXII. GOLDEN CITY 201 

XXIIL LITTLE CHINA 218 

XXIV. CALIFORNIA 22t 

XXV. MEXICO 233 

XXVI. REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT . . . . 239 

XXVII. BROTHERS 249 

XXVIIL AMERICA 258 

PART II. 

L PITCAIRN ISLAND 211 

n. HOKITIKA 218 

III. POLYNESIANS 293 

IV. PAREWANUI PAH 299 

y. THE MAORIES 319 

VL THE TWO FLIES . ... . . 328 

Vn. THE PACIFIC 334 

APPENDIX. 

A MAORI DINNER 389 



CONTENTS 



OF 



THE SECOND VOLUME. 



PART III. 



CHAPTER 

I. SYDNEY 
II. RIVAL COLONIES 

III. VICTORIA . . ■ 

IV. SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY 
V. COLONIAL DEMOCRACY 

VL PROTECTION . . 

VIL LABOR . . . . 

VIIL WOMAN . ... 

IX. VICTORIAN PORTS . 
X. TASMANIA 
XI. CONFEDERATION . 
XII. ADELAIDE 

XIII. TRANSPORTATION . 

XIV. AUSTRALIA 
XV. COLONIES 



PAOB 
t 

15 

22 
38 
44 
55 
65 
16 

83 

94 

98 

109 

123 

130 



PART IV. 



I. MARITIME CEYLON . 
n. KANDY. 

III. MADRAS TO CALCUTTA 

IV. BENARES 



• • • 



• • • . 



* • . • 



(ix) 



141 . 

154 

161 

in 



X 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTS& 

V. CASTE . 

VL MOHAMMEDAN CITIES 
Vn. SIMLA . , 

VIII. COLONIZATION 
IX. THE "gazette" 

X. UMRITSUR . 
XL LAHORE . 
XII. OUR INDIAN ARMY 

XIII. RUSSIA . 

XIV. NATIVE STATES . 
XV. SCINDE . 

XVI. OVERLAND ROUTES 
XVIL BOMBAY . 
XVIII. THE MOHURRUM . 
XIX. ENGLISH LEARNING 
XX. INDIA 
XXI. DEPENDENCIES 
XXII. FRANCE IN THE EAST 
XXIIL THE ENGLISH . 



pAoa 

178 
191 
202 
217 
224 
233 
245 
249 
255 
26t 
2S0 
289 
298 
305 
312 
320 
333 
339 
346 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



150 



VIEW FROM THE BULLER . . . Frontispiece. 

A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN . . FvontlSpiece. 

PROFILE OF "JOE SMITH" . . . . .. ") 

FULL FACE OP ''JOE SMITH" .... j 

PORTER ROCKWELL 154 

FRIDAY'S STATION — VALLEY OF LAKE TAHOE . . 176 

TEAMING UP TKJS GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE 

SIERRA 178 

VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER — THE PLACE WHERE 

GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND 180 

THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY . 
EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY 



.} 



228 



MAPS. 

ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC RAILROAD . . , .78 

LEAVENWORTH TO SALT LAKE CITY .... 92 

SALT LAKE CITY TO SAN FRANCISCO .... 158 
NEW ZEALAND 278 



THE OLD AND THE NEW: BUSH SCENERY — COLLINS STREET 

EAST, MELBOURNE . . ... . .24 

GOVERNOR DAVEY'S PROCLAMATION , . . . 86 

MAPS. 

AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA 16 

OVERLAND ROUTES 290 

(Xi) 



P^RT I. 

AMERICA. 



GREATER BRITAIN, 



CHAPTER L 

VIRGINIA. 



From the bows of tlie steamer Saratoga^ on the 20th 
June, 1866, 1 caught sight of the low works of Fort 
Monroe, as, threading her way between the sand- 
banks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed 
on, under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay. 

Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and king- 
fish, the keeping watch for flocks of canvas-back 
ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle work till 
we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown 
with ancient memories — ancient for America. Three 
towns of lost grandeur, or their ruins, stand there still. 
Williamsburg, the former capital, graced even to our 
time by the palaces where once the royal governors 
held more than regal state; Yorktown, where Coru- 
wallis surrendered to the continental troops; James- 
town, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607, thirteen 
years before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of 
Plymouth, Massachusetts. 

A bump against the pier of Fort Monroe soon 
roused us from our musings, and we found ourselves 
invaded by a swarm of stalwart negro troopers, clothed 
in the cavalry uniform of the United States, who 

(3) 



4 GREATER BRITAIN. 

boarded us for the mails. ]N"ot a white man save those 
we brought was to be seen upon the pier, and the blaz- 
ing sun made me thankful that I had declined an of- 
fered letter to Jeff. Davis. 

Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gant- ' 
let of the Kip-Raps passage, and made for Norfolk, 
having on our left the many exits of the Dismal 
Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Eoads — a grand 
bay with pleasant grassy shores, destined one day to 
become the best known, as by nature it is the noblest, 
of Atlantic ports — we nearly ran upon the wrecks of 
the Federal frigates Cumberland and Congress, sunk by 
the rebel ram Merrimac in the first great naval action 
of the war; but soon after, by a sort of poetic justice, 
we almost drifted into the black hull of the Merrimac 
herself. Great gangs of negroes were laboring laugh- 
ingly at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships. 

When we were securely moored at I^orfolk pier, I 
set off upon an inspection of the second city of Vir- 
ginia. Again not a white man was to be seen, but 
hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, build- 
ing, repairing, road-making, and happily chattering 
the while. At last, turning a corner, I came on a 
hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and its crowd of 
swaggering whites — "Johnny Rebs" all, you might 
see by the breadth of their brims, for across the Atlan- 
tic a broad brim denotes less the man of peace than 
the ex-member of a Southern guerrilla band, Morgan's, 
Mosby's, or Stuart's. No Southerner will wear the 
Yankee "stove-pipe" hat; a Panama or Palmetto for 
him, he says, though he keeps to the long black coat 
that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande. 

These Southerners were all alike — all were upright, 
tall, and heavily moustached; all had long black hair 
and glittering eyes, and I looked instinctively for the 



VIROINIA, 5 

baldric and rapier. It needed no second glance to as- 
sure me that as far as the men of ISTorfolk were con- 
cerned, the saying of our Yankee skipper was not far 
from the truth: *'The last idea that enters the mind of 
a Southerner is that of doing work." 

Strangers are scarce in JtTorfolk, and it was not long 
before I found an excuse for entering into conversa- 
tion with the "citizens." My first question was not 
received with much cordiality by my new acquaint- 
ances. "How do the negroes work? Wall, we spells 
nigger with two 'g's,' I reckon." (Virginians, I must 
explain, are used to " reckon" as much as are ^N^ew Eng- 
landers to "guess," while Western men " calculate" as 
often as they cease to swear.) "How does the niggers 
work ? Wall, niggers is darned fools, certain, but they 
ain't quite sich fools as to work while the Yanks will 
feed 'em. !N'o, sir, not quite sich fools as that." 
Hardly deeming it wise to point to the negroes work- 
ing in the sun-blaze within a hundred yards, while 
we sat rocking ourselves in the veranda of the inn, I 
changed my tack, and asked whether things were set- 
tling down in Norfolk. This query soon led my friends 
upon the line I wanted them to take, and in five min- 
utes we were well through politics, and plunging into 
the very war. "You're a Britisher. !N^ow, all that 
they tell you's darned lies. We're just as secesh as 
we ever was, only so many's killed that we can't fight 
— that's all, I reckon." "We ain't going to fight the 
North and West "again," said an ex-colonel of rebel 
infantry, "next time we fight, 'twill be us and the 
West against the Yanks. We'll keep the old flag then, 
and be darned to them." " If it hadn't been for the 
politicians, we shouldn't have seceded at all, I reckon: 
we should just have kept the old flag and the consti- 
tution, and the Yanks would have seceded from us. 

1* 



6 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Eeckon we'd have let 'em go." "Wall, boys, s'pose jj 
we liquor?" closed iu the colonel, shooting out his old 'i 
quid, and filling in with another. "We'd have fought ) 
for a lifetime if the cussed Southerners hadn't deserted <; 
like they did." I asked who these " Southerners" i 
were to whom such disrespect was being shown, i 
"You didn't think Virginia was a Southern State over 
in Britain, did you? 'cause Virginia is a border State, 
sir. We didn't go to secede at all; it was them blasted 
Southerners that brought it on us. First they wouldn't 
give a command to General Robert E. Lee, then they 
made us do all the fighting for 'em, and then, when 
the pinch came, they left us in the lurch. Why, sir, I 
saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a 
l)low — yes, sir: that's right down good whisky; jess 
you sample it." Here the steam-whistle of the Sara- 
toga sounded with its deep bray. " Reckon you'll have 
to hurry up to make connections," said one of my new 
friends, and I hurried off, not without a fear lest some 
of the group should shoot after me, to avenge the af- 
front of my quitting them before the mixing of the 
drinks. They were but a pack of "mean whites," 
^'N'orth Carolina crackers," but their views were those 
which I found dominant in all ranks at Richmond, and 
up tlie country in Virginia. 

After all, the Southern planters are not " The South," 
which for political purposes is composed of th» "mean 
whites," of the Irish of the towns, and of the South- 
western men — Missourians, Kentuckians, and Texans 
— fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment 
what we should call Southern, certainly not repre- 
sentatives of the " Southern Chivalry." The " mean 
whites," or " poor trash," are the whites who are not 
planters — members of the slaveholding race who never 
held a slave — white men looked down upon by the ne- 



VIRGINIA. 



groes. It is a necessary result of the despotic govern- 
ment of one race by another that the poor members of 
the dominant people are universally despised: the 
"destitute Europeans" of Bombay, the "white loaf- 
ers" of the Punjaub, are familiar cases. Where slaver;^ 

. exists, the "poor trash" class must inevitably be both 
large and wretched : primogeniture is necessary to keep 
the plantations sufficiently great to allow for the pay- 
ment of overseers and the supporting in luxury of the 
planter family, and younger sons and their descendants 
are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning 
their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country 
labor is degrading. 

The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of 

I many aristocratic virtues, along with every aristocratic 
vice ; but to each planter there were nine " mean 
whites," who, though grossly ignorant, full of inso- 

! lence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the 

* slightest provocation, were, until the election of Lin- 
coln to the presidency, as completely the rulers of 
America as they were afterward the leaders of the 
rebellion. 

At sunset we stai'ted up the James on our way to 

' City Point and Richmond, sailing almost between the 
very masts of the famous rebel privateer the Florida, 
and seeing her as she lay under the still, gray waters. 
She was cut out from a Brizilian port, and when claimed 
by the imperial government, was to have been at once 
surrendered. While the dispatches were on their way 
to ^N'orfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a Fed- 
eral gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of 
the Confederacv have hinted that the collision was 
strangely opportune ; nevertheless, the fact remains 
that the commander of the gunboat was dismissed the 
navy for his carelessness. 



8 QBE ATE R BRITAIN. 

The twilight was beyond description lovely. The 
change from the auks and ice-birds of the Atlantic to 
the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was not more 
sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and 
sensuous indolence ; but the scenery, too, of the river 
is beautiful in its very changelessness. Those who can 
Bee no beauty but in boldness might call the James as 
monotonous as the lower Loire. 

After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favor 
meditation. The soft air, the antiquity of the forest, 
the languor of the sunset breeze, all dispose to dream 
and sleep. That oak has seen Powhatan ; the found- 
ers of Jamestown may have pointed at that grand old 
sycamore. In this drowsy humor, we sighted the far- 
famed batteries of I^ewport !N'ews, and turning-in to 
berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near 
Petersburg. 

A little before sunrise we weighed again, and sought 
a passage through the tremendous Confederate " ob- 
structions." Rows of iron skeletons, the frame-works 
of the wheels of sunken steamers, showed above the 
stream, casting gaunt shadows westward, and varied 
only by here and there a battered smoke-stack or a 
spar. The whole of the steamers that had plied upon 
the James and the canals before the war were lying 
here in rows, sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two 
in the middle of each row had been raised to let the 
government vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and faint 
light the navigation was most difficult. For iive and 
twenty miles the rebel forts were as, thick as the hills 
and points allowed; yet, in spite of booms and bars, 
of sunken ships, of batteries and torpedoes, the Federal 
monitors once forced their way to Fort Darling in the 
outer works of Richmond. I remembered these things 
a few weeks later, when General Grant's first words to 



VIRGINIA. 9 

me at Washington were : " Glad to meet you. What 
have you seeu?" "The Capitol." "Go at once and 
see the Monitors." He afterward said to me, in words 
that photograph not only the Monitors, but Grant: 
"You can batter away at those things for a month, and 
do no good." 

At Dutch Gap we came suddenly upon a curious 
scene. The river flowed toward us down a long, straight 
reach, bounded by a lofty hill crowned with tremen- 
dous earthworks ; but through a deep trench or cleft, 
hardly fifty yards in length, upon our right, we could 
see the stream running with violence in a direction 
parallel with our course. The hills about the gully 
were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evi- 
dently meant as shelters from vertical fire, but the 
rough graves of a vast cemetery showed that the pro- 
tection was sought in vain. Forests of crosses of un- 
painted wood rose upon every acre of flat ground. On 
the peninsula, all but made an island by the cleft, was 
a grove of giant trees, leafless, barkless, dead, and 
blanched by a double change in the level of the stream. 
There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest, 
with a turkey-buzzard on each bough. On the bank 
upon our left was an iron scaffold, eight or ten stories 
high, — "Butler's Lookout," as the cleft was "Butler's 
Dutch Gap Canal." The canal, unfinished in war, is 
now to be completed at State expense for purposes of 
trade. 

As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula an 
eagle was seen to light upon a tree. From every por- 
tion of the ship — main deck, hurricane deck, lower 
deck ports — revolvers, ready capped and loaded, were 
brought to bear upon the bird, which sheered off un- 
harmed amid a storm of bullets. After this incident, 
I was careful in my political discussions with my ^hip- 



10 GREATER BRITAIN. 

mates; disarmament in the Confederacy had clearly 
not been extended to private weapons. 

The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we 
came in view of a many-steepled town, with domes 
and spires recalling Oxford, hanging on a bank above 
a crimson-colored foaming stream. In ten minutes we 
were alongside the wharf at Richmond, and in half an 
hour safely housed in the " Exchange Hotel," kept by 
the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the father was a pri- 
vate, the son a colonel, in the rebel volunteers. 

The next day, while the works and obstructions on 
the James were still fresh in my mind, I took train to 
Petersburg, the city the capture of which by Grant 
was the last blow struck by the Korth at the melting 
forces of the Confederacy. 

The line showed the war: here and there the track, 
torn up in ^N'orthern raids, had barely been repaired ; the 
bridges were burnt and broken ; the rails worn down 
to an iron thread. The joke '*on board," as they say 
here for ** in the train," was that the engine-drivers 
down the line are tolerably cute men, who, when the 
rails are altogether worn away, understand how to '' go 
it on the bare wood," and who at all times *'know 
where to jump." 

From the window of the car we could see that in 
the country there were left no mules, no horses, no 
roads, no men. The solitude is not all owing to the 
war : in the whole five and twenty miles from Rich- 
mond to Petersburg there was before the war but a 
single station ; in Is^ew England your passage-card often 
gives a station in every two miles. A careful look at 
the underwood on either side the line showed that this 
forest is not primeval, that all this country had once 
been plowed. 

Virginia stands first among the States for natural 



VIRGINIA, 11 

advantages: in climate she is unequaled; her soil is 
fertile ; her mineral wealth in coal, copper, gold, and 
iron enormous, and well placed ; her rivers good, and 
her great harbor one of the best in the world. Virginia 
has been planted more than two hundred and tifty 
years, and is as large as England, yet has a free popu- 
lation of only a million. In every kind of production 
she is miserably inferior to Missouri or Ohio, in most, 
inferior also to the infant States of Michigan and Illi- 
nois. Only a quarter of her soil is under cultivation, 
to half that of poor, starved New England, and the 
mines are deserted which were worked by the very 
Indians who were driven from the land as savages a 
hundred years ago. 

There is no surer test of the condition of a country 
than the state of its highways. In driving on the main 
roads round Kichm^nd, in visiting the scene of Mc- 
Clellan's great defeat on the Chickahominy at Mechan- 
icsville and Malvern Hill, I myself, and an American 
gentleman who was with me, had to get out and lay 
the planks upon the bridges, and then sit upon them, 
to keep them down while the black coachman drove 
across. The best roads in Virginia are but ill kept 
"corduroys;" but, bad as are these, '* plank roads" 
over which artillery have passed, knocking out every 
other plank, are worse by far ; yet such is the main 
road from Richmond toward the west. 

There is not only a scarcity of roads, but of railroads. 
A comparison of the railway system of Illinois and 
Indiana with the two lines of Kentucky or the one of 
Western Virginia or Louisiana, is a comparison of the 
South with the North, of slavery with freedom. Vir 
o-inia shows already the decay of age, but is blasted by 
slavery rather than by war. 

Passing through Petersburg, the streets of which 



12 GREATER BRITAIN. 

were gay with the feathery-brown blooms of the Vene- 
tian sumach, but almost deserted by human beings, 
who have not returned to the city since they were 
driven out by the shot and shell of which their houses 
show the scars, we were soon in the rebel works. 
There are sixty miles of these works in all, line within 
line, three deep; alternations of sand-pits and sand- 
heaps, with here and there a tree-trunk pierced for 
riflemen, and everywhere a double row of chevaux de 
fr'ise. The forts nearest this point were named by their 
rebel occupants Fort Hell and Fort Damnation. Tre- 
mendous works, but it needed no long interview with 
Grant to understand their capture. I had not been ten 
minutes in his oflice at Washington before I saw that 
the secret of his unvarying success lay in his unflmch- 
ing determination : there is pith in the American con- 
ceit which reads in his initials, ^'U. S. G.," "uncondi- 
tional-surrender Grant." 

The works defending Richmond, hardly so strong as 
those of Petersburg, were attacked in a novel manner 
in the third year of the war. A strong body of Fed- 
eral cavalry on a raid, unsupported by infantry or guns, 
came suddenly by night upon the outer lines of Rich- 
mond on the west. Something had led them to be- 
lieve that the rebels were not in force, and with the 
strange aimless daring that animated both parties 
during the rebellion, they rode straight in along the 
winding road, unchallenged, and came up to the inner 
lines. There they were met by a volley which emptied 
a few saddles, and they retired, without even stopping 
to spike the guns in the outer works. Had they known 
enough of the troops opposed to them to have con- 
tinued to advance, they might have taken Richmond, 
and held it long enough to have captured the rebel 
president and senate, and burned the great iron-works 



V Hi G INI A. 13 

and ships. The whole of the rebel army had gone 
north, and even the home guard was camped out on 
the Chickahominy. Tlie troops who iired the volley 
were a company of the "iron-works battalion," boys 
employed at the founderies, not one of whom had ever 
fired a ritie before this lught. They confessed them- 
selves that *'one minute more, and they'd have run;" 
but the volley just stopped the enemy in time. 

The spot where we first struck the rebel lines was 
that known as the Crater — the funnel-Bha{>ed cavity 
formed when Grant sprang his famous mine: 1.G00 
men are buried in the hollow itself, and the bones of 
those smothered by the falling earth are working 
through the soil: 5000 negro troops were killed in 
this attack, and are buried round the hollow where 
they died, fighting as gallantly as they fought every- 
where thioughout the war. It is a singular testimony 
to the continuousness of the tire, that the still remain- 
ing subterranean passages show that in countermining 
the rebels came once within three feet of the mine, yet 
failed to hear the working parties. Thousands of old 
army shoes were lying on the earth, and negro boys 
were digging up bullets for old lead. 

Within eighty yards of the Crater are the Federal 
investing lines, on which the trumpet-fiovver of our 
gardens was growing wild in deep rich masses. The 
negroes told me not to gather it, because they believe 
it scalds the hand. They call it "poison plant," or 
"blister weed." The blue-birds and scarlet tannagers 
were playing about the horn-shaped fiowers. 

Just within Grant's earthworks are the ruins of an 
ancient church, h>uilt, it is said, with bricks that were 
brought by the first colonists from England in 1G14. 
A-bout Norfolk, about Petersburg, and in the Shenan- 
doah Valley, you cannot ride twenty miles through the 

2 



14 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Virginian forest without bursting in upon some glade 
containing a quaint old church, or a creeper-covered 
roofless palace of the Culpeppers, the Randolphs, or the 
Scotts. The county names have in them all a history. 
Taking the letter "B" alone, we have Barbour, Bath, 
Bedford, Berkeley, Boone, Botetourt, Braxton, Brooke, 
Brunswick, Buchanan, Buckingham. A dozen coun- 
ties in the State are named from kings or princes. 
The slaveowning cavaliers whose names the remainder 
bear are the men most truly guilty of the late attempt 
made by their descendants to create an empire founded 
on disloyalty and oppression; but within sight of this 
old church of theirs at Petersburg, thirty-three miles 
of Federal outworks stand as a monument of how the 
atiempt was crushed by the children of their New Eng- 
land brother-colonists. 

The names of streams and hamlets in Virginia have 
often a quaint English ring. On the Potomac, near 
Harper's Ferry, I once came upon " Sir John's Run." 
Upon my asking a tall, gaunt fellow, who was fishing, 
whether this was the spot on which the Knight of 
Windsor *' larded the lean earth," I got for sole answer: 
" Wall, don't know 'bout that, but it's a mighty fine 
spot for yellow-fin trout." The entry to Virginia is 
characteristic. You sail between capes named from 
the sons of James I., and have fronting you the estu- 
aries of two rivers called after the King and the JDuke 
of York. 

The old "F. F. V.'s, the first families of Virginia, 
whose founders gave these monarchic, names to the 
rivers and counties of the State, are far ofiT now in 
Texas and California — those, that is, which were not 
extinct before the war. The tenth Lord Fairfax keeps 
a tiny ranch near San Francisco; some of the chief 
Denmans are also to be found in California. In all 



VIRGINIA. 15 

such cases of which I heard, the emigration took place 
before the war; JSorthern conquest could not be made 
use of as a plea whereby to escape the reproaches due 
to the slaveowning system. There is a stroke of jus- 
tice in the fact that the Virginian oligarchy have ruined 
themselves in ruirilr.g chcir State; but the gaming hells 
of Farobankcpolis, as Richmond once was called, have 
much for which to answer. 

When the '* burnt district" comes to be rebuilt, 
Richmond will be the most beautiful of all the At- 
lantic cities; while the water-power of the rapids of 
the James, and a situation at the junction of canal and 
river, secure for it a prosperous future. 

The superb position of the State-house (which 
formed the rebel capitol), on the brow of a long hill, 
whence it overhangs the city and the James, has in it 
something of satire. The Parliament-house of George 
Washington's own State, the State-house, contains the 
famed statue set up by the general assembly of the 
Commonwealth of Virginia to the hero's memory. 
Without the building stands the still more noteworthy 
bronze statue of the first President, erected jointly by 
all the States in the then Union. That such monu- 
ments should overlook the battle-fields of the war pro- 
voked by the secession from the Union of Washing- 
ton's loved Virginia, is a fact full of the grim irony of 
history. 

Hollywood, the cemetery of Richmond, is a place 
full of touching sad suggestion, and very beautiful, 
with deep shades and rippling streams. During the 
war, there were hospitals in Richmond for 20,000 men, 
and "always full," they say. The Richmond men 
who were killed in battle were buried where they fell; 
but 8000 who died in hospital are buried here, and 
over them is placed a wooden cross, with the inscrip- 



16 GREATER BRITAIN. 

tion in black paint, "Dead, but not forgotten." In 
another spot lie the Union dead, under the shadow of 
the j3ag for which they died. 

From Monroe's tomb the evening view is singularly 
soft and calm; the quieter and calmer for the drone 
in which are mingled the trills of the mocking-bird, 
the hoarse croaking of the bull- frog, the hum of the 
myriad fire-flies, that glow like summer lightning 
among the trees, the distant roar of the river, of 
which the rich red water can still be seen, beaten by 
the rocks into a rosy foam. 

With the moment's chillness of the sunset breeze, 
the golden glory of the heavens fades into gray, and 
there comes quickly over them the solemn blueness of 
the Southern night. Thoughts are springing up of 
the many thousand unnamed graves, where the rebel 
soldiers lie unknown, when the Federal drums in 
Richmond begin sharply beating the rappeL 



CHAPTEE 11. 



THE NEGRO. 



In the back country of Virginia, and on the borders 
of IN^orth Carolina, it becomes clear that our common 
English notions of the negro and of slavery are nearer 
the truth than common notions often ai*e. The Lon- 
don Christy Minstrels are not more given to bursts of 
laughter of the form "Yah ! yah !" than are the plant- 
ation hands. The negroes upon the Virginia farms 
are not maligned by those who represent them as de- 



THE NEGRO. 17 

ligliting in the contrasts of crimson and yellow, or 
emerald and sky-blue. I have seen them on a Sunday 
afternoon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced 
cravats, returning hurriedly from "meetin','' to dance 
break-downs, and grin from ear to ear for hours at a 
time. What better should we expect from men to 
whom until just now it was forbidden, under tremen- 
dous penalties, to teach their letters? 

l!^othing can force the planters to treat negro free- 
dom save from the comic side. To them the thins: is 

CD 

too new for thought, too strange for argument; the 
ridiculous lies on the surface, and to this they turn as 
a relief. When I asked a planter how the blacks pros- 
pered under freedom, his answer was, "Ours don't 
much like it. You see, it necessitates monogamy. If 
I talk about the 'responsibilities of freedom,' Sambo 
says, 'Dunno 'bout that; please, mass' George: me 
want two wife.' " Another planter tells me, that the 
only change he can see in the condition of the negroes 
since they have been free is that formerly the super- 
vision of the overseer forced them occasionally to be 
clean, whereas now nothing on earth can make them 
wash. He says that, writing lately to bis agent, he 
received an answer to which there was the following 
postscript: "You ain't sent no sope. You had better 
send sope: niggers is certaiyily needing sope." 

It is easy to treat the negro question in this way; 
easy, on the other hand, to assert that since history 
fails us as a guide to the future of the emancipated 
blacks, we should see what time will bring, and mean- 
while set down negroes as a monster class of which 
nothing is yet known, and, like the compilers of the 
Catalan map, say of places of which we have no knowl- 
edge, "Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes." As 
long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon 

2* 



18 ORE A TEH BRITAIN. 

the African west coast, the negro question is one of 
moment to ourselves. It is one, too, of mightier im- 
port, for it is bound up with the future of the English 
in America. It is by no means a question to be passed 
over as a joke. There are five millions of negroes in 
the United States; juries throughout ten States of the 
Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The 
matter is not only serious, but full of interest, political, 
ethnological, historic. 

In the South you must take nothing upon trust; be- 
lieve nothing you are told. Nowhere in the world do 
''facts" appear so differently to those who view them 
through spectacles of yellow or of rose. The old plant- 
ers tell you that all is ruin, — that they have but half 
the hands they need, and from each hand but a half 
day's work: the new men, with Northern energy and 
Northern capital, tell you that they get on very welL 

The old Southern planters find it hard to rid them 
selves of their traditions; they cannot understand free 
blacks, and slavery makes not only the slaves but the 
masters shiftless. They have no cash, and the Metayer 
system gives rise to the suspicion of some fraud, for 
the negroes are very distrustful of the honesty of their 
former masters. 

The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow 
out of the sudden emancipation of millions of slaves 
have not shown themselves as yet, in consequence of 
the great amount of work that has to be done in the 
cities of the South, in repairing the ruin caused during 
the war by fire and want of care, and in building places 
of business for the Northern capitalists.. The negroes 
of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked down to 
the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Nor- 
folk, Richmond, Wilmington, and Fort Monroe em- 
ployment for the moment. Their absence from the 



THE NEGEO, 19 

plantations makes labor dear up country, and this in 
itself tempts the negroes who remain on land to work 
sturdily for wages. Seven dollars a month — at the the 
rate equal to one pound — with board and lodging, 
were being paid to black iield hands on the corn and 
tobacco farms near Richmond. It is when the city 
^vorks are over that the pressure will come, and it will 
probably end in the blacks largely pushing northward, 
and driving the Irish out of hotel service at lN"ew York 
and Boston, as they have done in Philadelphia and 
St. Louis. 

Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land, 
and they complain loudly that none of the confiscated 
lands have been assigned to them. "Ef yer dun gib 
us de land, reckon de ole massas '11 starb de niggahs," 
was a plain, straightforward summary of the negro 
view of the negro question, given me by a white-bearded 
old " uncle" in Richmond, and backed by every black 
man within hearing in a chorus of "Dat's true, for 
shore;" but I found up the country that the planters 
are afraid to let the negroes own or farm for them- 
selves the smallest plot of land, for fear that they should 
sell ten times as much as they grew, stealing their 
''crop" from the granaries of their employers 

At a farm near Petersburg, owned by a jSTorthern 
capitalist, 1000 acres, which before emancipation had 
been tilled by one hundred slaves, now needed, I was 
told, but forty freedmen for their cultivation ; but when 
I reached the place, I found that the former number 
included old people and women, while the forty were 
all hale men. The men were paid upon the tally sys- 
tem. A card was given them for each day's work, 
which was accepted at the plantation store in payment 
for goods supplied, and at the end of the month money 
was paid for the remaining tickets. The planters say 



20 QBE ATE R BRITAIN. 

that the field hands will not support their old people; 
but this means only that, like white folk, they try to 
make as much money as they can, and know that if 
they plead the wants of their wives and children, the 
whii.es will keep their aged people. 

That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste, 
and thieves, is true; but it is as slaves, and not aa 
negroes, that they were all these things; and, after all, 
the eifects of slavery upon the slave are less terrible 
than its effects upon the master. The moral condition 
to which the planter class had been brought by slavery, 
shows out plainly in the speeches of the rebel leaders. 
Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confed- 
eracy, declared in 1861 that " Slavery is the natural 
and moral condition of the negro. ... I cannot per- 
mit myself to doubt," he went on, "the ultimate suc- 
cess of a full recognition of this principle throughout 
the civilized and enlightened world . . . iiegro slavery 
is in its infancy." 

There is reason to believe that the American negroes 
will justify the hopes of their friends ; they have made 
the best of every chance that has been given them as 
yet; they were good soldiers, they are eager to learn 
their letters, they are steady at their work: in Barba- 
does they are industrious and well conducted ; in La 
Plata they are exemplary citizens. In America the 
colored laborer has had no motive to be industrious. 

General Grant assured me of the great aptness at 
soldiering shown by the negro troops. In battle they 
displayed extraordinary courage, but if their officers 
were picked off they could not stand a charge; no 
more, he said, could their Southern masters. The 
power of standing firm after the loss of leaders is pos- 
sessed only by regiments where every private is as good 
as his captain and colonel, such as the Northwestern 
and l!^ew England volunteers. 



THE NEGRO. 21 

Before I left Richmond I had one morning found my 
way into a school for the younger blacks. There were 
as many present as the forms would hold — sixty, per- 
haps, in all-^and three wounded New England soldiers, 
with pale, thin faces, were patiently teaching them to 
write. The boys seemed quick and apt enough, but 
they were very raw — only a week or two in the school. 
Since the time when Oberlin first proclaimed the po- 
tential equality of the race by admitting negroes as 
freely as white men and women to the college, the 
negroes have never been backward to learn. 

It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting 
in abilities of a certain kind. Even in the imbecility 
of the Congo dance we note his unrivaled mimetic 
powers. The religious side of the negro character is 
full of weird suggestiveness; but superstition, every- 
where the handmaid of ignorance, is rife among the 
black plantation hands. It is thought that the pun- 
ishment with which the shameful rites of Obi-worship 
have been visited has proved, even in the City of E"ew 
Orleans, insuflicient to prevent them. Charges of 
witchcraft are as common in Virginia as in Orissa; in 
the Carolinas as in Central India the use of poison is 
often sought to work out the events foretold by some 
noted sorceress. In no direction can the matter be 
followed out to its conclusions without bringing us face 
to face with the sad fact that the faults of the planta- 
tion negro are every one of them traceable to the vices 
of the slavery system, and that the Americans of to-day 
are suffering beyond measure for evils for which our 
forefathers are responsible. We ourselves are not 
guiltless of wrong doing in this matter: if it is still im- 
possible openly to advocate slavery in England, it has, 
at least, become a habit persistently to write down 
freedom. We are no longer told that God made the 



22 ijt HEATER BRITAIN. 

bbicks to be slaves, but we are bade remember tbat 
they cannot prosper under emancipation. All men- 
tion of Barbadoes is suppressed, but we have daily 
bomilies on the condition of Jamaica. The negro 
question in America is briefly this: is there, on the 
one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land 
decreasing while black mouths to be fed increase, the 
Southern States will become an American Jamaica? 
Is there, on the other hand, ground for the hope that 
the negroes may be found not incapable of the citizen- 
ship of the United States ? The former of these two 
questions is the more difficult, and to some extent in- 
volves the latter: can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can 
cofPee, can tobacco, be raised by white field hands? If 
not, can they be raised with profit by black free labor? 
Can co-operative planting, directed by negro over- 
lookers, possibly succeed, or must the farm be ruled 
by white capitalists, agents, and overseers? 

It is asserted that the negro will not work with- 
out compulsion ; but the same may be said of the Eu- 
ropean. There is compulsion of many kinds. The 
emancipated negro may still be forced to work — 
forced as the white man is forced in this and other 
lands, by the alternative, work or starve ! This forcing, 
however, may not be confined to that which the laws 
of natural increase lead us to expect; it may be stimu- 
lated by bounties on immigration. 

The negro is not, it would seem, to have a 
monopoly of Southern labor in this continent. This 
week we hear of three shiploads of Chinese coolies as 
just landed in Louisiana; and the air is thick with 
rumors of labor from Bombay, from Calcutta, from 
the Pacific Islands — of Eastern labor in its hundred 
shapes — not to speak of competition with the whites, 
now commencing with the German immigration into 
Tennessee. 



THE NEGBO. 23 

The berries of this country are so large, so many, 
60 full of juice, that alone they form a never-failing 
source of nourishment to an idle population. Three 
kinds of cranberries, American, pied, and English; 
two blackberries, huckleberries, high-bush and low- 
bush blueberries — the latter being the English bilberry 
— are among the best known of the native fruits. No 
one in this country, however idle he be, need starve. 
If he goes farther south, he has the banana, the true 
staff of life. 

The terrible results of the plentiful possession of 
this tree are seen in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coast- 
lands of Mexico, at Auckland in New Zealand. At 
Pitcairn's Island the plantain grove has beaten the 
missionary from the field; there is much lip-Chris- 
tianity, but no practice to be got from a people who 
possess the fatal plant. The much-abused cocoanut 
cannot come near it as a devil's agent. The cocoa- 
palm is confined to a few islands and coast tracts — 
confined, too, to the tropics and sea-level; the plantain 
and banana extend over seventy-degrees of latitude, 
down to Botany Bay and King George's Sound, and 
up as far north as the Khyber Pass. The palm asks 
labor — not much, it is true ; but still a few days' hard 
work in the year in trenching, and climbing after the 
nuts. The plantain grows as a weed, and hangs down 
its bunches of ripe tempting fruit into your lap as you 
lie in its cool shade. The cocoanut-tree has a hundred 
uses, and urges men to work to make spirit from its 
juice, ropes, clothes, matting, bags, from its fiber, oil 
from the pulp; it creates an export trade which appeals 
to almost all men by their weakest side, in ottering 
large and quick returns for a little work. John Ross's 
"Isle of Cocoas," to the west of Java and south of 
Ceylon, yields him heavy gains; there are profits to be 



24 GREATER BRITAIN. 

made upon the Liberian coast, and even in Southern 
India and Ceylon. The plantain will make nothing; 
you can eat it raw or fried, and that is all ; you can eat 
it every day of your life without becoming tired of its 
taste; without suifering in your health, you can live on 
it exclusively. In the banana groves of Florida and 
Louisiana there lurks much trouble and danger to the 
American free States. 

The negroes have hardly much chance in Virginia 
against the Northern capitalists, provided with white 
labor; but the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, 
and South Carolina promise to be wholly theirs. Al- 
ready they are flocking to places in which they have a 
majority of the people, and can control the municipal- 
ities, and defend themselves, if necessary, by force; 
but if the Southerners of the coast desert their country, 
the negroes will not have it to themselves, unless na- 
ture declares that they shall. New Euglanders will 
pour in with capital and energy, and cultivate the land 
by free black or by coolie labor, if either will pay. If 
they do pay, competition will force the remaining 
blacks to work or starve. 

The friends of the negro are not without a fear that 
the laborers will be too many for their work, for, 
while the older cotton States appear to be worn out, 
the new, such as Texas and Tennessee, will be re- 
served by public opinion to the whites. For the 
present the negroes will be masters in seven of the 
rebel States; but in Texas, white men — English, Ger- 
mans, Danes — are growing cotton with success; and 
in Georgia and North Carolina, which contain mount- 
ain districts, the negro power is not likely to be per- 
manent. 

We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general principle 
that, when the negro can fight his way through oppo- 



THE NEGRO. 25 

sition, and stand alone as a farmer or laborer, without 
the aid of private or State charity, then he should be 
protected in the position he has shown himself worthy 
to hold, that of a free citizen of an enlightened and 
laboring community. Where it is found that when 
liis circumstances have ceased to be exceptional, the 
negro cannof live unassisted, there the Federal gov- 
ernment may fairly and w^isely step in and say, "We 
wall not keep you ; but we will carry you to Liberia 
or to Hayti, if you will." 

It is clear that the Southern negroes must be given 
a decisive voice in the appointment of the legislatures 
by which they are to be ruled, or that the North must 
be prepared to back up by force of opinion, or if need 
be, by force of arms, the Federal Executive, when it 
insists on the Civil Rights Bill being set in action at 
the South. Government through the negroes is the 
only way to avoid government through an army, which 
would be dangerous to the freedom of the is^orth. It 
is safer for America to trust her slaves than to trust 
her rebels — safer to enfranchise than to pardon. 

A reading and writing basis for the suffrage in the 
Southern States is an absurdity. Coupled with par- 
dons to the rebels, it would allow the *'boys in gray" 
— the soldiers of the Confederacy — to control nine 
States of the Union; it would render the education of 
the freedmen hopeless. For the moment, it would 
entirely disfranchise the negroes in six States, whereas 
it is exactly for the moment that negro suffrage is in 
these States necessary; while, if the rebels were ad- 
mitted to vote, and the negroes excluded from the poll, 
I the Southern representatives, united with the Copper- 
\ head wing of the Democratic party, might prove to be 
strong enough to repudiate the Federal debt. This is 
one of a dozen dangers. 



26 GREATER BRITAIN. 

All education basis for the sutfragc, though pre- 
tended to be impartial, would be manifestly aimed 
against the negroes, and would perpetuate the antip- 
athy of color to which the war is supposed to have put 
an end. To education such a provision would be a 
death-blow. If the negroes were to vote as soon as 
they could read, it is certain that the planters would 
take good care that they never should read at all. 

That men should be able to examine into the details 
of politics is not entirely necessary to the working of 
representative government. It is sufficient that they 
should be competent to select men to do it for them. 
In tlie highest form of representative government, 
where all the electors are both intelligent, educated, 
and alive to the politics of the time, then the member 
returned must tend more and more to be a deleo-ate. 
That has always been the case with the Northern and 
Western members in America, but never with those 
returned by the Southern States ; and so it will con- 
tinue, whether the Southern elections be decided by 
negroes or by "mean whites." 

In Warren County, Mississippi, near A^icksburg, is 
a plantation which belongs to Joseph Davis, the brother 
of the rebel president. This he has leased to Mr. 
Montgomery — once his slave — in order that an associ- 
ation of blacks may be formed to cultivate the planta- 
tion on co-operative principles. It is to be managed 
by a council elected by the community at large, and a 
voluntary poor-rate and embankment-rate are to be 
levied on the people by themselves. 

It is only a year since the termination of the war, 
and the negroes are already in possession of schools, 
village corporations, of the Metayer system, of co- 
operative farms ; all this tells of rapid advance, and 
the conduct and circulation of the Neio Orleans Tribune^ 



^ 



THE SOUTH. 27 

edited and published by negroes, and selling 10,000 
copies daily, and another 10,000 of the weekly issue, 
speaks well for the progress of the blacks. If the 
Montgomery experiment succeeds, their future is se- 
cure. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SOUTH. 

The political forecasts and opinions which were 
given me upon plantations were, in a great measure, 
those indicated in my talk with the Norfolk "loafers." 
On the history of the commencement of the rebellion 
there was singular unanimity. " Virginia never meant 
to quit the Union ; we were cheated by those rascals 
of the South. When we did go out, we were left to 
do all the lighting. Why, sir, Fve seen a Mississippian 
division run away from a single Yankee regiment." 

As I heard much the same story from the Korth 
Carolinians that 1 met, it would seem as though there 
was little union among the seceding States. The 
legend upon the first of all the secession flags that 
were hoisted was typical of this devotion to the for- 
tunes of the State: "Death to abolitionists; South 
Carolina <?oes it alone ;'^ and durini' the whole war it 
was not the rebel colors, but the palmetto emblem, or 
other State devices, that the ladies wore. 

About the war itself but little is said, though here 
and there I met a man who would tell camp stories in 
the Northern style. One planter, who had been "out" 
himself, went so far as to say to me: "Our officers 



28 GREATER BRITAIN, 

were good, but considering that our rank and file 
were just * white trash,' and that they had to fight 
regiments of New England Yankee volunteers, with 
all their best blood in the ranks, and Western sharp- 
shooters together, it's only wonderful how we weren't 
whipped sooner." 

As for the future, the planter's policy is a simple 
one: "Reckon we're whipped, so we go in now for the 
old flag; only those Yankee rogues must give us the 
control of our own people." The one result of the 
war has been, as they believe, the abolition of slavery ; 
otherwise the situation is unchanged. The war is over, 
the doctrine of secession is allowed to fall into the 
background, and the ex-rebels claim to step once more 
into their former place, if, indeed, they admit that they 
ever left it. 

Every da}^ that you are in the South you come more 
and more to see that the ''mean whites" are the con- 
trolling power. The landowners are not only few in 
number, but their apathy during the present crisis ia 
surprising. The men who demand their readmission 
to the government of eleven States are unkempt, fierce- 
eved fellows, not one whit better than the brancos of 
Brazil; the very men, strangely enough, who them- 
selves, in their " Leavenworth constitution," first began 
disfranchisement, declaring that the qualification for 
electors in the new State of Kansas should be the 
taking oath to uphold the infamous Fugitive Slave 
Law. 

These *'mean whites" were the men who brought 
about secession. The planters are guiltless of every- 
thing but criminal indiiference to the deeds that were 
committed in their name. Secession v/as the act of a 
pack of noisy demagogues; but a false idea of honor 
brought round a majority of the Southern people, 



THE SOUTH. 29 

and the infection of enthusiasm carried over the re- 
mainder. 

When the war sprang up, the old Southern con- 
tempt for the Yankees broke out into a fierce burst of 
J03% that the day had come for paying off old scores. 
"We hate them, sir," said an old planter to me. "I 
wish to God that the Mayflower had sunk with all 
hands in Plymouth Bay." 

Along with this violence of language, there is a 
singular kind of cringing to the conquerors. Time 
after time I heard the complaint, ''The Yanks treat 
us shamefully, I reckon. We come back to the Union, 
and give in on every point; we renounce slavery; we 
consent to forget the past; and yet they won't restore 
us to our rights." Whenever I came to ask what they 
meant by "rights," I found the same haziness that 
everywhere surrounds that word. The Southernerb 
seem to think that men may rebel and fight to the 
death against their country, and then, being beaten, 
lay down their arms and walk quietly to the polls along 
with law-abiding citizens, secure in the protection of 
the Constitution which for years they have fought to 
subvert. 

At Richmond I had a conversation which may serve 
as a specimen of what one hears each moment from 
the planters. An old gentleman with whom I was 
talking politics opened at me suddenly: "The Radicals 
are going to give the ballot to our niggers to strengthen 
their party, but they know better than to give it to 
their ISTorthern niggers.'' 

D. — "But surely there's a difference in the cases." 

The Planter. — ''You're right — there is; but not your 
way. The difference is, that the Northern niggers can 
read and write, and even lie with consistency, and oura 
can't." 

3* 



30 GEEATER BRITAIN. 

2). — "But there's the wider difference, that negro 
suffrage down here is a necessity, unless you are to rule 
the country that's just beaten you.'" 

The Planter. — " Well, there of course we differ. We 
rebs say we fought to take our State out of the Union. : 
The Yanks beat us ; so our States must still be in the 
Union. If so, w^hy shouldn't our representatives be 
unconditionally admitted ?" 

Nearer to a conclusion we of course did not come, 
he declaring that no man ought to vote who had not 
education enough to understand the Constitution, I, 
that this was good prima fade evidence against letting 
him vote, but that it might be rebutted by the proof 
of a higher necessity for his voting. As a planter said 
to me, "The Southerners prefer soldier rule to nigger 
rule;" but it is not a question of what they prefer, but 
of what course is necessary for the safety of the Union 
which they fought to destroy. 

Nowhere in the Southern States did I find any ex- 
pectation of a fresh rebellion. It is only Englishmen 
who ask whether "the South" will not fight "once 
more." The South is dead and gone; there can never 
be a " South" again, but only so many Southern States. 
*'The South" meant simply the slave country; and 
slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery gave us but 
two classes besides the negroes — planters and "mean 
whites." The great planters were but a few thousand 
in number; they are gone to Canada, England, Ja- 
maica, California, Colorado, Texas. The "mean 
whites" — the true South — are impossible in the face 
of free labor : they must work or starve. If they 
work, they will no longer be " mean whites," but es- 
sentially Northerners — that is, citizens of a democratic 
republic, and not oligarchists. 

As the Southerners admit that there can be no far- 



THE SOUTH. 31 

tlier war, it would be better even for themselves that 
they should allow the sad record of their rising to fade 
away. Their speeches, their newspapers continue to 
make use of language which nothing could excuse, and 
which, in the face of the magnanimity of the conquer- 
ors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper I have seen a 
leader which describes with hideous minuteness Lin- 
coln, Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in 
hell. A Texas cutting which I have is less blasphe- 
mous, but not less vile: *'The English language no 
longer aftbrds terms in which to curse a sniveling, 
weazen-faced piece of humanity generally denomin- 
ated a Yankee. We see some about here sometimes, r 
but they skulk around, like sheep-killing dogs, and 
associate mostly with niggers. They whine and prate, 
and talk about the judgment of God, as if God had 
anything to do with them." The Southerners have 
not even the wit or grace to admit that the men who 
beat them were good soldiers; "blackguards and 
braggarts," "cravens and thieves," are common names 
for the men of the Union army. I have in my posses- 
sion an Alabama paper in which General Sheridan, at 
that time the commander of the military division which 
included the State, is styled "a short-tailed slimy tad- 
pole of the later spawn, the blathering disgrace of an 
honest father, an everlasting libel on his Irish blood, 
the synonym of infamy, and scorn of all brave men." 
While I was in Virginia, one of the Richmond papers 
said: "This thing of 'loyalty' will not do for the 
Southern man.'' 

The very day that I landed in the South a dinner 
was given at Kichmond by the "Grays," a volunteer 
corps which had fought through the rebellion. After 
the roll of honor, or list of men killed in battle, had 
been read, there were given as toasts by rebel officers: 



32 GREATEH BRITAIN. 

"Jeff. Davis— the caged eagle; the bars coiiiine his 
person, but his great spirit soars;" and "The con- 
quered banner, may its resurrection at last be as bright 
and as glorious as theirs — the dead." 

It is in the face of such words as these that Mr. 
Johnson, the most unteachable of mortals, asks men 
who have sacriliced their sons to restore the Union to 
admit the ex-rebels to a considerable share in the gov- 
ernment of the nation, even if they are not to monop- 
olize it, as they did before the war. His conduct seems 
to need the Western editor's defense : " He must be 
kinder honest-like, he aire sich a tarnation foolish 
critter." 

It is clear, from the occurrence of such dinners, the 
publication of such paragraphs and leaders as those of 
which I have spoken, that there is no military tyranny 
existing in the South. The country is indeed admin- 
istered by military commanders, but it is not ruled by 
troops. Before we can give ear to the stories that are 
afloat in Europe of the "government of major-gen- 
erals," we must believe that live millions of English- 
men, inhabiting a countr}^ as large as Europe, are 
crushed down by some ten thousand other men — 
about as many as are needed to keep order in the sin- 
gle town of Warsaw. The Southerners are allowed to 
rule themselves; tlie question now at issue is merely 
whether they shall also rule their former slaves, the 
negroes. 

I hardly felt myself out of the reach of slavery and 
rebellion till, steaming up the Potomac from Aquiai 
Creek by the gray dawn, I caught sight of a grand 
pile towering over a city from a magnificent situation 
on the brow of a long, rolling hill. Just at the mo- 
ment, the sun, invisible as yet to us below, struck the 
marble dome and cupola, and threw the bright gilding 



THE EMPIRE STATE, 33 

into a golden blaze, till the Greek shape stood out upon 
the blue sky, glowing like a second sun. The city was 
Washington; the palace with the burnished cupola the 
Capitol; and within two hours I was present at the 
"hot-weather sitting" of the 39th Congress of the 
United States. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THB EMPIRE STATE. 

At the far southeast of l!Tew York City, where the 
Hudson and East River meet to form the inner bay, 
is an ill-kept park that might be made the loveliest 
garden in the world. Nowhere do the features that 
have caused New York to take rank as the first port 
of America stand forth more clearly. The soft even- 
ing breeze tells of a climate as good as the world can 
show; the setting sun floods with light a harbor secure 
and vast, formed by the confluence of noble streams, 
and girt with quays at which huge ships jostle; the 
rows of 500-pounder Rodmans at "The Narrows" are 
tokens of the nation's strength and wealth; and the 
yachts, as well handled as our own, racing into port 
from an ocean regatta, give evidence that there are 
Saxons in the land. At the back is the city, teeming 
with life, humming with trade, muttering with the 
thunder of passage. Opposite, in Jersey City, people 
say: "Every New Yorker has come a good half-hour 
late into the world, and is trying all his life to make it 
up.'* The bustle is immense. 

All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men 



34 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

speaking what Czar Nicholas was used to call "the 
American tongue," I wheel round, crying — *"'Dear 
me! if here are not some English folk!" astonished 
as thougli I had heard French in Australia or Italian 
in Timbuctoo. 

The Englishman who, coming to America, expects 
to find cities that smell of home, soon learns that 
Baker Street itself, or Portland Place, would not look 
English in the dry air of a continent four thousand 
miles across. Kew York, however, is still less English 
than is Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago — her people 
are as little Saxon as her streets. Once Southern, 
with the brand of slavery deeply printed in the fore- 
heads of her foremost men, since the defeat of the re- 
bellion ISTew York has to the eye been cosmopolitan as 
any city of the Levant. All nationless towns are not 
alike: Alexandria has a Greek or an Italian tinge; 
San Francisco an English tone, with something of the 
heartiness of our Elizabethan times; New York has a 
deep Latin shade, and the democracy of the Empire 
State is of the French, not of the American or English 
type. 

At the back, here, on the city side, are tall gaunt 
houses, painted red, like those of the quay at Dort or 
of the Boompjes at Rotterdam, the former dwellings 
of the ''Knickerbockers^' of ISTew Amsterdam, the 
founders of ISIew York, but now forgotten. There 
may be a few square yards of painting, red or blue, 
upon the houses in Broadway; there may be here and 
there a pagoda summer-house overhanging a canal; 
once in a year you may run across a worthy descend- 
ant of the old Netherlandish families; but in the main 
the Hollanders in America are as though they had 
neven been; to find the memorials of lost Dutch em- 
pire, we must search Cape Colony or Ceylon The 



THE EMPIBE STATE. 35 

New York un-English tone is not Batavian. [Neither 
the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, 
nor the Germans whose names are now upon the 
doors, nor, for the matter of that, we English, who 
claim JS'ew York as the second of our towns, are the 
to-day's N^ew Yorkers. 

Here, on the water's edge, is a rickety hall, where 
Jenny Lind sang when first she landed — now the spot 
where strangers of another kind are welcomed to 
America. Every true repuhlican has in his heart the 
notion that his country is pointed out by God for a re- 
fuge for the distressed of all the nations. lie has sprung 
himself from men who came to seek a sanctuary — 
from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims of 
the Mayjiower. Even though they come to take the 
bread from his mouth, or to destroy his peace, it is his 
duty, he believes, to aid the immigrants. Within the 
last twenty years there have landed at ISTew York alone 
four million strangers. Of these two-thirds were Irish. 

While the Celtic men are pouring into New York 
and Boston, the New Englanders and New Yorkers, 
too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts are op- 
posed to this portentous theory. They are going West. 
The unrest of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent 
with his country's present, that of the Saxon by hope 
for his private future. The Irishman flies to New 
York because it lies away from Ireland ; the English- 
man takes it upon his road to California. 

Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another 
blood soon lose their nationality. In New York and 
Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for these are 
Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in 
the country districts, a few years make the veriest 
Paddy English. On the other hand, the Saxons are 
aisappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the Spaniards 



36 OREATER BRITAIN, 

have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating 
down the English, as the English have crushed out the 
Dutch. The Hollander's descendants in Kew York 
are English now; it bids fair that the Saxons should 
be Irish. 

As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted 
only twenty years, the results are already clear: if you 
see a Saxon face upon the Broadway, you may be sure 
it belongs to a traveler, or to some raw English lad 
bound West, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We 
need not lay much stress upon the fact that all New 
Yorkers have black hair and beard: men may be 
awarthy and yet English. The ancestors of the Lon- 
doners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roys- 
terers; yet not one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet 
Street or on Tower Hill is as fair as the average Saxon 
peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern counties were 
peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings: the 
Sussex eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suliblk. The. 
Puritans of New England are sprung from those of 
the "associated counties," but the victors of Marston 
Moor may have been cousins to those no less sturdy 
Protestants, the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It 
may be that they were our ancestors, those Dutchmen 
that we English crowded out of New Amsterdam — the 
very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt. 
The fiery temper of the new people of the American 
coast towns, their impatience of free government, are 
better proofs of Celtic blood than are the color of their 
eyes and beard. 

Year by year the towns grow more and more in- 
tensely Irish, Already of every four births in Boston, 
one only is Aroericap, There are 120,000 foreign to 
70,000 native voters In New York and Brooklyn. 
Montr(3al and Richman4 ^re fast becoming Celtic; 



THE EMPIRE STATE. 37 

Philadelphia — shades of Penn ! — can only be saved by 
the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is de- 
parting with the Saxons: the revenues of the Empire 
State are spent upon Catholic asylums; plots of city 
land are sold at nominal rates for the sites of Catholic 
cathedrals, by the "city 6'^ep-fathers," as they are called. 
Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain 
ground more rapidly than in New York City: there 
are 80,000 professing Catholics in Boston. 

When is this drama, of which the first scene is played 
in Castle Garden, to have its close? The matter is 
grave enough already. Ten years ago, the third and 
fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia, 
were as English as our London: the one is Irish now; 
the other all but German. Not that the Quaker City 
will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too, are going 
out upon the land ; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. 
All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while 
the country continues English: a fierce and easily- 
roused people will throng the cities, while the law- 
abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. 
Our relations with America are matters of small mo- 
ment by the side of the one great question : Who are 
the Americans to be? 

Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers 
that hang over them. The "Know-Nothing" move- 
ment failed, but Protection speaks the same voice in 
its opposition to commercial centers. If you ask a 
Western man why he, whose interest is clearly in Free 
Trade, should advocate Protection, he fires out : "Free 
Trade is good for our American pockets, but it's death 
to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won't 
touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt- 
water despotism, and the ascendency of New York and 
Boston. Which is better for the country — one New 

4 



38 GREATER BRITAIN. 

York, or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious 
Lowells?" 

The danger to our race and to the world from Irish 
ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the 
republic. In January, 1862, the mayor, Fernando 
"Wood, the elect of the *' Mozart" Democracy, deliber- 
ately proposed the secession from the Union of New 
York City. Of all the I^orthern States, I^ew York 
alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people during 
the war of the rebellion. The constituents of Wood 
were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call 
"American." It is America that Fenianism invades 
from Ireland — not England from America. 

It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent 
tliem as somewhat dangerous inhabitants for mighty 
cities. Of the sixty thousand persons arrested yearly 
in i^ew York, three-fourths are alien born: two-thirds 
of these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are 
the Celts at present masters of a city government — 
nowhere is there such corruption. The purity of the 
government of Melbourne — a city more democratic 
than New York — proves that the fault does not lie in 
democracy: it is the universal opinion of Americans 
that the Irish are alone responsible. 

The State legislature is falling into the hands of the 
men who control the city council. They tell a story 
of a traveler on the Hudson River Railroad, w^ho, as 
the train neared Albany — the capital of New York- 
said to a somewhat gloomy neighbor, " G-oing to the 
State legislatur' ?" getting for answer, "No, sir! It's 
not come to that with me yet. Only to the State 
prison !" 

Americans are never slow to ridicule the denational- 
ization of New York. They tell you that during the 
war the colonel of one of the city regiments said : " I've 



THE EMPIRE STATE. 39 

the best blood of eight nations in the ranks." " How's 
that?" "I've English, Irish, Welsb^ Scotch, French, 
Italians, Germans." "Guess that's only seven." 
" Swedes," suggested some one. " JS'o, no Swedes," 
said the colonel. "Ah! I have it: I've some Ameri- 
cans." Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are 
aothing loth to tell ; but they take no steps to check 
the denationalization they lament. Instead of enter- 
ing upon a reform of their municipal institutions, they 
affect to despise free government; instead of giving, 
as the oldest New England families have done, their 
tone to the State schools, they keep entirely aloof from 
school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cam- 
bridge, Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to 
the colleges of their native land, they leave it to 
learned pious Boston to supply the West with teach- 
ers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if 
they are pointed at as ''no Americans," they seem 
to separate themselves from everything that is Amer- 
ican : they spend summers in England, winters in 
Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a 
sneer, " Good New Yorkers go to Paris when they die." 

Apart from nationality, there is danger to free 
government both in the growth of New York City, 
and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers. The 
income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends 
is larger than the combined salaries of the president, 
the governors, and the whole of the members of the 
legislatures of all the forty-live States and territories. 
As my informant said, " He could keep the govern- 
ments of half a dozen States as easily as I can support 
my half dozen children." 

There is something, no donbt, of the exaggeration 
of political jealousy about the accounts of New 
York vice given in New England and down South, 



4^0 GREATEB BRITAIN, 

in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped 
that the overstatement is enormous, for sober men 
are to be found even in New York who will tell you 
that this city outdoes Paris in every form of profligacy 
as completely as the French capital outherods imperial 
Korae. There is here no concealment about the mat- 
ter ; each inhabitant at once admits the truth of accu- 
sations directed against his neighbor. If the new 
men, the ^'petroleum aristocracy," are second to none 
in their denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn 
unite with the oldest families in thundering against 
*' Shoddy." 

New York life shows but badly in the summer-time; 
it is seen at its worst when studied at Saratoga. With 
ourselves, men have hardly ceased to run from business 
and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative quiet 
of the country house. Among New Yorkers there is 
not even the affectation of a search for rest ; the flight 
is from the drives and restaurants of New York to the 
gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning piles of 
greenbacks to losing heaps of gold ; from cotton gam- 
bling to roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more 
vulgar in its vice ; it is the Margate, Saratoga the 
Homburg of America. 

"Shoddy" is blamed bej^ond what it deserves when 
the follies of New York society are laid in a body at 
its door. If it be true that the New York drawing- 
rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true 
that entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and emi- 
nence as to wealth. If exclusiveness be needed, af- 
fectation can at least do nothing toward subduing 
"Shoddy." Mere cliqueism, disgusting evei^y where, 
is ridiculous in a democratic town ; its rules of con- 
duct are as out of place as kid gloves in the New Zea- 
land bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-iield. 



THE EMPIBE STATE. 41 

Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the 
men and beauty to the women of a moneyed class ; 
but in America these things are the inheritance of 
every boy and girl, and give their owners no advant- 
age in the world. During the rebellion, the ablest 
generals and bravest soldiers of the North sprang, not 
from the merchant families, but from the farmer folk. 
Without special merit of some kind, there can be no 
such thing as aristocracy. 

Many American men and women, who have too 
little nobility of soul to be patriots, and too little un- 
derstanding to see that theirs is already, in many points, 
the master country of the globe, come to you, and be- 
wail the fate which has caused them to be born citi- 
zens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where 
men call vices by their names. The least educated of 
their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that 
America brings forth, they fly to Europe ''to escape 
democracy," and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, 
living libels ou the country they are believed to repre- 
sent. 

Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knicker- 
bockers, Germans, Irish, "first families," "Petroleum," 
and "Shodd}^," we are forced to construct our compo^ 
site idea — New York. The Irish numerically predom- 
inate, but we have no experience as to what should be 
the m.oral features of an Irish city, for Dublin has al- 
ways been in English hands; possibly that which in 
New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely Celtic. 
However it may be, this much is clear, that the hum- 
blest township of New England reflects more truly the 
America of the past, the most chaotic village of Ne- 
braska portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies 
of the America of the future, than do this huge State 

and city. 

4* 



4i GREATER BRITAIN. 

If the political figure of New York is not encourag- 
ing, its natural beauty is singularly great Those who 
say that America has no scenery, forget the Hudson, 
while they can never have explored Lake George, 
Lake Champlain, and the Mohawk. That Poole's ex- 
quisite scene from the "Decameron," *' Philomela's 
Song," could have been realized on earth, I never 
dreamt until I saw the gingers at a New Yorker's villa 
on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, 
from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic 
palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some 
such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of 
his brilliant letters — that dated "Sing Sing" — for he 
speaks of himself as lying on a hill that overhung the 
Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the hot 
sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the 
river where it disappeared in the blue "Highlands." 

That New York City itself is full of beauty the view 
from Castle Garden would suffice to show; and by 
night it is not less lovely than by day. The harbor 
is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand 
boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never 
sleeps. The paddles of the steamers seem not ox\[y to 
beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so pro- 
voke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and 
Wall Street ferries burn so bri^htlv that in the warm 
glare the eye reaches through the still night to the 
feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view 
is as southern as the people ; we have not yet found 
America. 



CAMBBIDQE C0M3IRNCEMENT. 



CHAPTEE V. 

CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 

" Old Cambridge ! Long may she flourisli !" pro- 
posed by a professor in the University of Cambridge, 
in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers, 
by the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard, is a 
toast that sets one thinking. 

Cambridge in America is not by any means a uni- 
versity of to-day. Harvard College, which, being the 
only "house,'' has engrossed the privileges, funds, and 
titles of the university, was founded at Cambridge, 
Mass., in 1636, only ninety years later than the great- 
est and wealthiest college of our Cambridge in old 
England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather than 
the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Har- 
vard himself, and Dunster, the first president of Har- 
vard's College, were among the earliest of the scholars 
of Emmanuel. 

A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cam- 
bridge of old England is one from younger to elder 
sister; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, "The Autocrat," 
said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni 
celebration of 1866. 

Like other old institutions, Harvard needs a ten- 
days' revolution : academic abuses flourish as luxu- 
riantly upon American as on English soil, and univer- 
sity difficulties are much the same in either country. 
Here, as at home, tBe complaint is that the men come 
up to the university untaught. To all of them their 
college is forced for a time to play the high-school ; to 
some she is never anything more than school. At liar- 



M ORE ATE R BRITAIN. 

vard tills is worse than with oui'selves : the average age 
of entry, though of late much risen, is still considerably 
under eighteen. 

The college is now aiming at raising gradually the 
standard of entry: when once all are excluded save 
men, and thinking men, real students, su«h as those 
by whom some of the new Western universities are 
attended, then Harvard hopes to leave drill -teaching 
entirely to the schools, and to permit the widest free- 
dom in the choice of studies to her students. 

Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other 
universities, she is conservative of bad things as well 
as good; indeed, ten minutes within her walls would 
suffice to convince even an Ens^Hshman that Harvard 
clings to the times before the Revolution. 

Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things — 
in the dress of her janitors and porters, in the cut of 
the grass-plots and college gates, in the conduct of the 
Commencement orations in the chapel. For the dainty 
little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends 
and brothers recite their disquisitions none but Latin 
programmes were provided, and the poor ladies were 
condemned to find such names as Bush, Maurice, Ben- 
jamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the gradu- 
ating youths, distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beuiamin, 
Hvmphredvs, Vnderwood. 

This conservatism of the Kew England universities 
had just received a sharp attack. In the Commence- 
ment oration, Dr. Hedges, one of the leaders of the 
Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity 
for a complete freedom of study after, entry, a liberty 
to take up what line the student would, to be examined 
and to graduate in what he chose. He had instanced 
the success of Michigan University consequent upon 
the adoption of this plan ; he had pointed to the fact 



CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 45 

that of all the universities in America, Michigan alone 
drew her students from everj State. President Hill 
and ex-President Walker had indorsed his views. 

There is a special litness in the reformers coming 
forward at this time. This 3'ear is the commencement 
of a new era at Harvard, for at the request of the col- 
lege staff, the connection of the university with the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dis- 
solved, and the members of the board of overseers are 
in future to be elected by the university, instead of 
being nominated by the State. This being so, the 
question had been raised as to whether the governor 
would come in state to Commencement, but he yielded 
to the wishes of the graduates, and came with the 
traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and 
escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet 
coats and polish recalled the times before the Revo- 
lution. 

While the ceremou}^ vv^as still in progress, I had 
been introduced to several of the foremost rowina: 
men among the younger graduates of Harvard, and 
at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river. 
They v^^ere in strict training for their university race 
with Yale, which was to come off in a week, and as 
Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and this 
year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms 
on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could 
offer was soon given: they were dashing, fast, long in 
their stroke; strong, considering their light weights, 
but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule 
the old English notions as to training which have long 
since disappeared at home, and, looked upon as fa- 
natics by their friends and tutors, the}?- have all the 
fanatic's excess of zeal. 

Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of 



4^ GREATER BRITAIN. - 

skating and base ball, are botb neglected and despised 
in America. When the smallest siom of a reaction 
appears in the New England colleges, there comes at 
once a cry from Boston that brains are being post- 
poned to brawn. If New Englanders would look 
about them, they would see that their climate has of 
itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and 
that if national degeneracy is to be long prevented, 
brawn must in some way be fostered. The high 
shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men 
are not incompatible with the possession of the most 
powerful brain, the keenest wdt; but it is not probable 
that energy and talent will be continued in future 
generations sprung from the worn-out men and women 
of to-day. 

The prospect at present is not bright ; year by year 
Americans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. 
Elian's Americans, we may remember, though they 
were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were 
inferior to them in length of life. The women show 
even greater signs of weakness than the men, and the 
bigh, undulating tones which are affectation in the 
French, are natural to the ladies of America; little can 
be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive 
dancing in overheated rooms. 

The American summer, often tropical in its heat, 
has much to answer for, but it is the winter which 
makes the saddest havoc among the younger people, 
and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day 
in the close air of the heated school-house, the poor 
children are at night made to run straight back to the 
furnace-dried atmosphere of home. Tlae thermometer 
is commonly raised indoors to eighty or ninety degrees 
Fahr. The child is not only baked into paleness and 
sweated bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out 



CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 47 

of mistaken kindness, upon the most indigestible of 
dainties — pastry, hot dongh-nuts, and sweetmeats 
taking the place of bread, and milk, and meat — and 
is not allowed to take the slightest exercise,. except its 
daily run to school-house. Who can wonder that spinal 
diseases should prevail ? 

One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is 
that, as a people, they are hewers of primeval forest 
and tillers of virgin soil. These are the uu healthiest 
emploj-ments in the w^orld : the sun darts down upon 
the hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious 
gases, against which the new settlers have no an- 
tidotes. 

The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs 
are still looked on somewhat coldly by the majority of 
the professors, who obstinately refuse to see that im- 
proved physical type is not an end, but a means, to- 
ward improvement of the mental faculties, if not in 
the present, at least in the next generation. As for 
the moral training in the virtues of obedience and 
command, for which a boat's crew is the best of 
schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where 
rowing is confined to the half dozen men who are to 
represent the college in the annual race, and the three 
or four more who are being trained to succeed them 
in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was tilJ 
ten years since at old Cambridge, and is still at Ox- 
ford — not an exercise for the majority of the students, 
but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture 
is, however, said to be making some small progress in 
the older States, and I myself saw signs of the tendency 
in Philadelphia. The war has done some good in this 
respect, and so has the inHuxof Canadians to Chicago. 
Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in 
some few cities. When I w^as coming in to Baltimore 



48 GREATER BRITAIN. 

by train, we passed a meadow in wbicli a match was 
being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking 
at the time, looked at the players, and said with sur- 
prise: ^* Reckon they've got a wounded man ther', 
front o' them sticks, sab/' I found that he meant the 
batsman, who was wearing pads. 

One of the most brilliant of Harvard's thinkers has 
taken to carpentrying as a relief to his mental toil; 
her most famed professor is often to be found working 
in his garden or his farm ; but such change of work 
for work is possible only to certain men. The gener- 
ality of Americans need not only exercise, but relaxa- 
tion; still, with less physical, they possess greater 
mental vitality then ourselves. 

On the day that follows Commepcement — the chief 
ceremony of the academic year — is held once in three 
summers the *'Alumni Celebration," or meeting of the 
past graduates of Harvard — a touching gathering at all 
times, but peculiarly so in these times that follow on 
the losses of the war. 

The American college informal organizations rest 
upon the unit of the "class." The "class" is what at 
Cambridge is called "men of the same year," — men 
who enter together and graduate together at the end 
of the regular course. Each class of a large New Eng- 
land college, such as Hai-vard, will often possess an as- 
sociation of its own; its members will dine together 
once in iive years, or ten^ — men returning from Europe 
and fi'om the far West to be present at the gathering. 
Harvard is strong in the aftections of the New 
England people — her faults are theirs; they love her 
for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for 
in the whole list of graduates for this year I could 
find only two Irish names. 

Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was 



CAMBRIDGE C0MMENGE3IENT. i^ 

marshaled in the library in which the order was by 
classes; the oldest class of which there were living 
members being called the first. "Class of 1797!" and 
two old white haired gentlemen tottered from the 
crowd, and started on their march down the central 
aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the 
hottest days that America had ever known. "Class 
of 1800!' missing two years, in which all the gradu- 
ates were dead; and out came one, the sole survivor. 
Then came "1803," and so on, to the stalwart com- 
pany of the present year. When the classes of 1859 
and 1860, and of the war-years were called, those who 
marched out showed many an empty sleeve. 

The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not 
only for the efforts, of the university reformers, but 
also for the foundation of the Memorial Hall, dedicated 
as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while 
serving their country in the suppression of the late re- 
bellion. The purity of their patriotism hardly needed 
illustration by the tire of young Everett, or the graceful 
speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid oratory of 
Governor Bullock could do little more than force us 
to read for ourselves the Roll of Honor, and see how 
many of Harvard's most distinguished younger men 
died for their country as privates of Massachusetts 
Volunteers. 

There was a time, as England knows, when the 
thinking men of Boston, and the Cambridge profes- 
sors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen 
more of almost equ^l fame, morally seceded from their 
country's councils, and were followed in their seces- 
sion by the younger men. " The best men in America 
stand aloof from politics," it was said. 

The country from which these men seceded was not 
the America of to-day : it was the Union which South 

5 



50 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge professors 
**came out," not because they feared to vex their 
nerves with the shock of public argument and action, 
but because the course of the slaveholders was not 
their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could 
not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong- 
doers; another matter, this, from the ** hating hatred" 
of our culture class in England. 

In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. "When 
America was first brought to see the things that had 
been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in 
her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest blow 
for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had 
been urging on the movement from without at once 
re-entered the national ranks, and, marched to victory. 
Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz, 
and Emerson, w^iole battalions went forth to war. 
From Oberlin almost every male student and professor 
marched, and the university teaching was left iu the 
women's hands. Out of 8000 school-teachers in Penn- 
sylvania, of whom oOO alone were drafted, 3000 volun- 
teered for the war. Everywhere the teachers and their 
students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from 
that time forward America and her thinkers were at one. 

The fierce passions of this day of wakening have 
not been suffered to disturb the quiet of the academic 
town. Our English universities have not about them 
the classic repose, the air of study, that belong to Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the 
lanes of Leyden, and compared them with the noisy 
Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean 
when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her 
daughter-town ; but even the English Cambridge has 
a bustling street or two, and a weekly market-day, 
while Cambridge in New England is one great aca- 



i 



CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 51 

demic grove, buried in a philosophic calm which out- 
university towns can never rival so long as men resort 
to them for other purposes than work. 

It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the old- 
ness of JS'ew England is to be remarked. Although 
her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all pro- 
gress, their country has a look of gable-ends and 
steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the 
hands of Alfred. In all England there is no city which 
has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the elm- 
shaded towns round Boston; Dorchester, Chelsea, ^a- 
hant, and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fel- 
low; the people speak the English of Elizabeth, and 
joke about us, " speaks good English for an Eng- 
lishman." 

In the country districts, the winsome villages that 
nestle in the dells seem to have been therefor ten cen- 
turies at least; and it gives one a shock to light on 
such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only 
one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was 
slain there by Eed Indians, with eighty youths, "the 
flower of Ess^x County," as the Puritan history says. 

The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the 
Strides of Michigan, have taken the New Englanders 
by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in their intel- 
lectual supremacy, they forgot that in a Federal Union 
the moral and physical primacy will generally both 
reside in the same State. The Commonwealth of Mas- 
sachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of the 
doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more 
acting as its champion — this time on behalf of herself 
and her five sister States. 

Were the six New England Commonwealths grouped 
together in a single State, it would still have only three- 
fourths of the population of New York, and about an 



52 GREATER BRITAIN. 

equal number of inhabitants witb Pennsylvania. The 
State of Rhode Island is one-fourlh the size of many a 
single Californian county. Such facts as these will 
not be long lost sight of in the West, and when a 
divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer 
her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized 
by that of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the 
Senate be allowed to remain untouched, it is certain 
that the redistribution of seats consequent upon the 
census of 1870 will completely transfer political power 
to the central States. That New England will by this 
change inevitably lose her hold upon the destinies of 
the whole Union is not so clear. The induence for 
good of NcAV England upon the West has been chiefly 
seminal; but not for that the less enormous. Go into 
a State such as Michigan, where half the people are 
immigrants — where, of the remaining moiety, the 
greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in 
no way of New England — and you will find that the 
inhabitants are for the most part earnest, God-fearing 
men, with a New England tone of profound manliness 
and conviction running through everything they say 
and do. The colleges in which they have been reared 
are directed, you will fi.nd, by New England professors, 
men trained in the classic schools of Harvard, Yale, 
or Amherst; the ministers under whom they sit are, 
for the most part, Boston men ; the books they read 
are of New England, or old English of the class from 
which the writers of the Puritan States themselves 
have drawn their inspiration. To New England is 
chiefly due, in short, the making of America a godly 
nation. 

It is something in this age to come across a people 
who believe strong!}^ in anything, and consistently act 
upon th>iir beliefe: the New Englanders are such a 



CAMBRIDQE COMMENCEMENT. 53 

race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so com- 
mon that we can afford to despise them when found: 
and nowhere does religion enter more into daily life 
than in Vermont or Massachusetts. 

The States of the Union owe so huge a deht of grat- 
itude to New England, that on this score alone they 
may refrain from touching her with sacrilegious hands. 
Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single little 
State of Massachusetts — one-fourth the size of Scot- 
land, and but half as populous as Paris — sent during 
the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments to the 
field. 

It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 
1861, at a minute's notice, he needed men for the de- 
fense of Washington. So entirely were Southerners 
of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true 
supporters of the old flag, that " Yankee" became a 
general term for loyalists of any State. America can 
never forget the steady heroism of New England 
during the great struggle for national existence. 

The unity that has been the chief cause of the 
strength of the New England influence is in some 
measure sprung from the fact that these six States are 
completely shut oft* from all America by the single 
State of New York, alien from them in political and 
moral life. Every Yankee feels his country bounded 
by the British, the Irish, and the sea. 

In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the 
New Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the 
advantages of a bad climate and a miserable soil. 
These have been the true agents in the development 
of the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee 
people. In the war, for instance, it was plain that the 
children of tbe poor and rugged Northeastern States 
were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-\.' ters of 

5* 



g| ORE ATE R BRITAIN. 

Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they 
believed to be a ris:hteou8 cause. 

One effect of the poverty of soil with which !N'ew 
England is afflicted has been that her sons have wan- 
dered from end to end of the known world, engaging 
in every trade, and succeeding in all. Sometimes there 
is in their migrations a religious side. Mormonism, 
although it now draws its forces from Great Britain, 
was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on my 
way home, I met three Yankees returning from a 
Maine colony lately founded at Jaffii, in expectation of 
the fulfil Inient of prophecy, and destruction of the Mo- 
hammedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing 
for a firman from the very government upon the com- 
ing fall of which all their expectations have been based ; 
and these fierce fanatics are making money by man- 
affinor a hotel. One of them told me that the Jafia 
colony is a "religio-commercial speculation." 

iN'ew England Yankees are not always so filled with 
the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of 
money-making. Even the Massachusetts common 
schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out 
their black sheep into the world. At Center Harbor, 
in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the 
"Yankee spawn" in a Maine man — a shrewd, sailor- 
looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordi- 
nary, and asked me to take a glass of his champagne. 
I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was a Brit- 
isher. 

**I was subject to your government once for sixteen 
months," my neighbor said. 

"Really! Where?" 

" Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner tliere. And very 
lucky, too." 

"Why so?" I asked. 



CANADA. 55 

"Because, if the American government had caught 
me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But / 
wasn't a pirate.'* 

With over-great energy I struck in, "Of course 
not." 

Ml/ Neighbor. — "iVb; I was a slaver J" 

Idling among the hills of Kew Hampshire and the 
lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger, starting 
free from prejudice, not to end by loving the pious 
people of JS^ew England, for ho will see that there 
could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom 
throughout the world than the loss by them of au 
influence upon American life and thought, which has 
been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is 
not America. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CANADA. 



There is not in the world a nobler outlook than 
that from off the terrace at Quebec. You stand upon 
a rock overhanging city and river, and look down 
upon the guardship's masts. Acre upon acre of tim- 
ber comes floating down the stream above the city, the 
Canadian songs just reaching you upon the heights; 
and beneath you are fleets of great ships, English, 
German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber 
from the floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are 
nowhere to be seen. Such are the distances in North 
America, that here, farther from the sea than is any 



56 GREATER BRITAIN. 

city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seaport 
town, with gunboats and three-decker; morning and 
evening guns, and bars of "God save the Queen," to 
mark the opening and closing of the port. 

The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in a iiat cable- 
land, through which some earlier Niagara seums to 
have cut for it a way. Some of the tributanes are 
in sight, all falling from a cliff into the deep still 
river. In the distance, seaward, a silver riobon on 
the rock represents the grand falls of Moncmorenci. 
Long villages of white tiny cots straggle along the 
roads that radiate from the city; the great black 
cross of the French parish church showing reverently 
from all. 

On the north, the eye reaches to the rugged outlined 
of the Laurentian range, composed of the oldest mount- 
ains in the world, at the foot of which is Lake St. 
Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at a 
later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch 
bark. 

Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European 
middle ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that 
lead up to lofty gabled houses, with sharp French roofs 
of burnished tin, like those of Liege; processions of 
the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the 
Virgin; sabots; blouses; and the scarlet of the Brit^ 
ish linesman, — all these are seen in narrow streets and 
markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace, 
cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yan-\ 
kee State of Maine. It is not far from JSTew England 
to old France. 

Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in 
Guernsey. Norman- French inhabitants, guarded by 
British troops, step-built streets, thronged fruit-market, 
and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays, 



CANADA. 57 

are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper 
l!v'ormandy patois is not without its use; it procured 
nie an offer of a pinch of snuff from an old habitante on 
board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy 
of the ancien regime. 

There has been no dying-out of the race among the 
French Canadians. They number twenty times the 
thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The 
American soil has left their physical type, religion, 
language, laws, and habits absolutely untouched. 
They herd together in their rambling villages, dance 
to the fiddle, after mass on Sundays, as gayly as once 
did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lj^s 
and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the 
French are the Lower Canadian habitants. 

Not only here, but everywliero, a French " depend- 
ency" is France transported; not a double of the 
France of to-day, but a mummy of the France of the 
time of the ''colony's'^ foundation. In Saigon, you 
find Imperial France; here the France of Louis Qua- 
torze. The Englishman fo^mds everywhere a New 
England — new in thought as in soil; the Frenchman 
carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying 
recollection of the Palais Eoyal. In San Francisco 
there lives a great French capitalist, who, since 1849, 
has been the originator of every successful Californian 
speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and 
his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, 
is to bid his old French servant assure him, upon honor, 
that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has 
been brought for him from France. There is much in 
the colonizing instinct of our race, but something, per- 
haps, in the consideration that the English are hardly 
happy enough at home to be always looking back to 
what they have left in the old country. 



5S OliEATER BRITAIN. 

There is about this old France something of Dutch 
sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle 
in the market-place, where the grand old dames, in 
snowy caps, sit selling plums and pears; there is much 
singing made over the lading of the timber-ships; 
there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the river; 
old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on 
their lumberinfi: wav to town, with much clackins: of 
whips and clappering of wooden shoes. All these 
things there are, but then there are these and more in 
Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix — in all those towns 
which in Europe come nearest to old France. There 
is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not 
noisy; but the life is sleepy; the rafts float, and are 
not tugged nor rowed ; the old Korman horses seem 
to draw the still older carts without an eftbrt, and the 
very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and 
make a clatter simply because the}- cannot help it. 

In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British 
troops are here employed as guardians of the only 
true French colony in the world against the inroads of 
the English race. ''Nos institutions, notre langue, 
nos lois," is the motto of the habitants. Their news- 
papers are filled with church celebrations, village fetes, 
speeches of "M. le Cure" at the harvest-home, an- 
nouncements by the '' scherif," speech of M. Cartier 
at the consecration of Monseigneur Laroque, blessings 
of bells, of sliips; but of life, nothing — of mention of 
what is passing in America, not a word. One corner 
is given to the world outside America: "Emprunt 
Pontifical, Emission Am^ricaine, quatre millions de 
piastres," heads a solid column of holy finance. The 
pulse-beat of the continent finds no echo here. 

It is not only in political afiairs that there is a want 
of energy in French or Lower Canada; in journeying 



CANADA. 59 

from Portland to Quebec, the moment the frontier was 
passed, we seemed to have come from a land of life to 
one of death. No more bustling villages, no more 
keeu-eyed farmers: a fog of unenterprise hung over 
the land ; roads were wanting, houses rude, swamps 
undrained, fields un weeded, plains untilled. 

If the Eastern Townships and country round Quebec 
are a wilderness, they are not a desert. The country 
on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in summer it is 
hot — mosquitoes are not unknown : even at Tadousac, 
where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there 
is sunlight as strong as that of Paris. Once in the 
northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic — no house, 
no boat, no sign of man's existence, no beasts, no 
birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck 
and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord, 
walled in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down 
into depths to which their height above water is as 
nothing; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, 
inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon — that is 
all. The ''whales and porpoises," which are advertised 
by the Tadousac folks as certain to " disport them- 
selves daily in front of the hotel," are never to be seen 
in this earth-crack of the Saguenay. 

The cold, for summer, was intense; nowhere in the 
world does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so 
far south as in the longitude of the Saguenay. At 
night we had a wonderful display of northern lights. 
A white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died 
away, and was succeeded by broad white clouds, 
stretching from east to west, and sending streamers 
northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery 
columns in the north, northwest, and northeast, on 
which all the colors of the rainbow danced and played. 
After moonrise, the whole seemed gradually to fade 
away. 



60 GREATEB BRITAIN. 

At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigatioD, I found a 
fur-buying station of the Hudson's Bay Company; but 
that association has enough to answer for without 
being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay. 
The company has not here, as upon the Red Eiver, 
sacrificed colonists to minks and silver-foxes. There 
is something more blighting than a monopoly that op- 
presses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the 
boat that I was aboard touched at St. Paschal, now 
called Riviere du Loup, the St. Lawrence terminus of 
the Grand Trunk line : we found there immense 
wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a 
single ship, great or small. Even in Virginia I had 
seen nothing more disheartening. 

I^orth of the St. Lawrence religion is made to play 
as active a part in politics as in the landscape. Lower 
Canada, as we have seen, is French and Catholic ; Up- 
per Camida is Scotch and Presbyterian, though the 
Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Cath- 
olics in numbers. 

Had the Catholics been united, they might, since 
the fusion of the two Canadas, have governed the 
whole country: as it is, the Irish and French neither 
w^orship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have 
had nearly their own way. 

Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the 
French threw in their lot with the scheme for the con- 
federation of the provinces, and their clergy took up 
the cause with a zeal which they justified to their flocks 
by pointing out that the alternative was annexation 
to America, and possible confiscation of the church 
lands. 

Confederation of the provinces means separation of 
the Canad^a, which regain each its Parliament; and 
the French Catholics begin to hope that the Irish of 



CANADA. 61 

Upper Canada, now that they are less completely over- 
phaded by the more numerous French, will again act 
with their co-religionists: the Catholic vote in the new 
confederation will be nearly half the whole. In To- 
ronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in 
Montreal their presence is not unknown : it is a ques- 
tion whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not 
disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have their 
Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the 
French have theirs upon the Place d'Armes. The 
want of union may save the dominion from the estab- 
lishment of Catholicism as a State Church. 

The confederation of our provinces was necessary, 
if British North America was to have a chance for 
life; but it cannot be said to be accomplished while 
British Columbia and the Red River tract are not in- 
cluded. To give Canada an outlet on one side is some- 
thing, but communication with the Atlantic is a small 
matter by the side of communication at once with At- 
lantic and Pacific through British territory. We shall 
soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior, and 
thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that 
the line is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and 
bitter cold; but, on the other hand, it is well supplied 
with wood, and if it possess no such fertile tracts as 
that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the 
frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains. 

We are now even left in doubt how long we shall 
continue to possess so much as a route across the con- 
tinent on paper. Since the cession of Russian America 
to the United States, a map of E^orth America has 
been published in which the name of the Great Re- 
public sprawls across the continent from Behring's 
Straits to Mexico, with the "E" in "United" omin- 
ously near Vancouver's Island, and the " T" actually 

6 



62 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

planted upon British territory. If we take up the 
British Columbian, we find the citizens of the mainhind 
portion of the province proposing to sell the island for 
twenty million dollars to the States. 

Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and Cali- 
fornia, and situated, for purposes of reinforcement, 
immigration, and supply, at a distance of not less than 
twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific 
colonies can hardly be considered strong in their al- 
legiance to the crown: we have here the redactio ad 
absurdum of home government. 

Our hindering trade, by tolerating the presence of 
two sets of custom-houses and two sets of coins be- 
tween Ilalitiax and Lake Superior, was less absurd 
than our altogether preventing its extension now. 
Under a so-called confederation of our American pos- 
sessions, we have left a country the size of civilized 
Europe, and nearly as large as the United States — 
lying, too, upon the track of commerce and highroad 
to China — to be despotically governed by a company 
of traders in skins and peltries, and to remain as long 
as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and desertion 
needed to insure the presence of fur-bearing beasts. 

"Red River" should be a second Minnesota, Halifax 
a second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Fran- 
cisco ; but double government has done its work, and 
the outposts of the line of trade are already in Am(^r- 
lean, not British hands. The gold mines of i^ova 
Scotia, the coal mines and forests of British Columbia, 
are owned in Kew England and 'New York, and the 
Californians are expecting the proclamation of an 
American territorial government in the capital of Van- 
couver's Island. 

As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of 
the *' colonization" of Red River by citizens of the 



CANADA. 63 

United States, such as preceded the hoisting of the 
*']one star" in Texas, and the " bear flag" in California, 
by Fremont; and resistance by the Hudson's Bay Conri- 
pany will neither be possible, nor, in the interests of 
civilization, desirable. 

Even supposing a great popular awakening upon 
colonial questions, and the destruction of the Hud- 
son's Bay monopoly, we never could make the Cana- 
dian dominion strongs. With the addition of Columtia 
and Red River, British America would hardly be as 
powerful or populous as the two Northwestern States 
of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New York 
— one out of forty-five. ^'Help us for ten years, and 
then we'll help ourselves," the Canadians say; "help 
us to become ten millions, and then we will stand 
alone;" but this becoming ten millions is not such an 
easy thing. 

The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British 
territories are derived from maps of North America, 
made upon Mercator's projection, which are grossly 
out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator. 
The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their 
proper size, and such gigantic proportions are given 
to the northern parts of the Hudson territory that we 
are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there 
must be some little value. The true size is no more 
shown upon the map than is the nine-months' winter. 

To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is 
not for lack of asking that population fails to come. 
Admirably executed gazettes give the fullest informa- 
tion about the British possessions in the most glowing 
of terms; offices and agencies are established in Liver- 
pool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and a dozen other 
cities; government immigration agents and informa- 
tion offices are to be found in every town in Canada; 



64 GREATER BRITAIN. 

the government immigrant is looked after in health, 
comfort, and religion; directions of the fullest kind 
are given him in the matters of money, clothes, tools, 
luggage; Canada, he is told by the government papers, 
possesses perfect religious, political, and social free- 
dom; British subjects step at, once into the possession 
of political rights; the winter is but bracing, the cli- 
mate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres 
of surveyed crown lands are continually in the market. 
To one who knows what the northern forests are there 
is perhaps something of satire in the statement that 
"there is generally on crown lands an unlimited sup- 
ply of the best fuel. " What of that, however ? The in- 
tending immigrant knows nothing of the struggle with 
the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. The mining 
of the precious metals, the fisheries, petroleum, all are 
open to the settler — let him but come. Heading these 
documents, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how 
it is that human selfishness allows the Canadian of- 
ficials to disclose the wonders of their El Dorado to 
the outer world, and invite all men to share blessings 
which we should have expected them to keep as a 
close preserve for themselves and their nearest and 
dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the immi- 
grants are told, is five and a half times what it is in 
Canada, two and a half times the English rate. La- 
b(^rers by the thousand, merchants and farmers by the 
score, are said to be flocking into Canada to avoid the 
taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life 
in Canada is 37 per cent, higher than in the States. 
Yet, in the face of all these facts, only twenty or two 
and twenty thousand immigrants come to Canada for 
three hundred thousand that flock annually to the 
States, and of the former many thousands do but pass 
through on their way to the Great West. Of the 



CANADA. 65 

twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, 
but four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada; 
and there are a quarter of a million of persons born in 
British America now naturalized in the United States. 

The passage of the immigrants to the Western 
States is not for want of warning. The Canadian 
government advertise every Coloradan duel, every 
lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kan- 
sas, by way of teaching the immigrants to respect the 
country of which they are about to become free 
citizens. 

It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange state- 
ments are not harmless — not harmless to Canada, I 
mean. The Provincial government by these publica- 
tions seems to confess to the world that Canada can 
live only by running down the great republic. Cana- 
dian sympathy for the rebellion tends to make us think 
that these northern statesmen must not only share in 
our old-world confusion of the notions of right and 
wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bar- 
gain. It is only by their position that they are blinded, 
for few countries have abler men than Sir James Mac- 
donald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Gait; but, 
like men standing on the edge of a clitf, Canadian 
statesmen are always wanting to jump oif. Had Great 
Britain left them to their own devices, we should have 
had war with America in the spring of 1866. 

The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous : 
of the two chief sections of our race — that in Britain 
and that in America — the latter is again split in twain, 
and one division governed from across the Atlantic. 
For such government there is no pretext, except the 
wishes of the governed, who gain by the connection 
men for their defense, and the opportunity of gratify- 
ing their spite for their neighbors at our expense. 

6* 



66 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Those who ask why a connection so one sided, so op- 
posed to the best interests of our race, should be suf- 
fered to continue, are answered, now that the argument 
of "prestige" is given up, that the Canadians are loyal, 
and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it 
not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Cana- 
dians hate the Americans can be no reason why we 
should spend blood and treasure in protecting them 
against the consequences of their hate. The world 
should have passed the time when local dislikes can be 
suffered to affect our policy toward the other sections 
of our race; but even were it otherwise, it is hard to 
see how twelve thousand British troops, or a royal 
standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of 
two thousand miles in length from a nation of five 
and thirty millions. Canada, perhaps, can defend her- 
self, but we most certainly cannot defend her; we pro- 
voke much more than we assist. 

As for Canadian "loyalty," it appears to consist 
merely of hatred toward America, for while we were 
fighting China and conquering Japan, that we might 
spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set 
upon our goods protective duties of 20 per cent, which 
they have now in some degree removed, only that 
they may get into, their hands the smuggling trade 
carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their 
neighbor. We might, at least, fairly insist that the 
connection should cease, unless Canada will entirelv 
remove her duties. •: 

At bottom, it would seem as though no one gained 
by the retention of our hold on Canada. Were she 
independent, her borders would never again be wasted 
by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible 
danger of being the battle-field in which European 
quarrels are fought out. Canada once republican, the 



CANADA. 67 

Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most vio- 
lent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of 
other than moral means to merge her territories in the 
Union. An independent Canada would not long delay 
the railway across the continent to Puget Sound, which 
a British bureau calls impossible. England would be 
relieved from the fear of a certain defeat by America 
in the event of war — a fear always harmful, even when 
war seems most unlikely; relieved, too, from the cost 
of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866. 

Did Canada stand alone, no offense that she could 
give America would be likely to unite all sections 
of that country in an attempt to conquer her; while, 
on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted 
to the death by an armed and brave people, four mil- 
lions strong. As it is, any offense toward America 
committed by our agents, at any place or time, or 
arising out of the continual changes of policy and of 
ministry in Great Britain, united to the standing 
offense of maintaining the monarchical principle in 
!N^orth America, will bring upon unhappy Canada the 
whole American nation, indignant in some cause, just, 
or seeming just, and to be met by a people deceived into 
putting their trust in a few regiments of British troops, 
sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be backed 
by reinforcements which could never come in time, 
did public opinion in Great Britain so much as permit 
their sailing. In all history there is nothing stranger 
than the narrowness of mind that has led us to see in 
Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile 
country. There are more sons of British subjects in 
America than in Canada, by far; and the American 
looks upon the old country with a pride that cannot 
be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers. 

The independence of Canada would put an imme- 



58 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

diate end to much of the American jealousy of Great 
Britain — a consideration which of itself should out- 
weigh any claim to protection which the Canadians 
can have on us. The position which we have to set 
before us in our external dealings is, that we are no 
more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the 
Americans of the ISTorth or West. 

The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, 
known as "Hole in the "Woods'' among the friends of 
Toronto and Montreal, and once called Bytown. It 
consists of the huge Parliament-house, the govern- 
ment printing-office, some houseless wildernesses 
meant for streets, and the hotel where the members 
of the leo:islature " board." Such was the senatorial 
throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust 
into a detached building made of half-inch planks, 
with wide openings between the boards; and as the 
French Canadian members were excited about the 
resignation of Mr. Gait, indescribable chattering and 
bawling filled the house. 

The view from the Parliament-house is even more 
thoroughly Canadian than that from the terrace at 
Quebec — a view of a land of rapids, of pine forests, 
and of lumberers' homes, full of character, but some- 
what bleak and dreary; even on the hottest summer's 
day, it tells of winter storms past and to come. On 
the far left are the island-filled reaches of the Upper 
Ottawa; nearer, the roaring Chaudiere Falls, a mile 
across — a mile of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of 
jets, of spray. From the "caldron" itself, into which 
we can hardly see, rises a column of rainbow-tinted 
mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now 
fast falling before the settler's axe. Below you is the 
river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam ; on the 
right, a gorge — the mouth of the Rideau Canal. 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 69 

When surveyed frora the fittest points, the CbanJi- 
^re is but little behind Magara; but it may be doubted 
whether in any fall there is that which can be called 
sublimity. IS^atural causes are too evident; water, 
rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. 
How difiTerent frora a storm upon the coast, or from a 
September sunset, where the natural causes are so re- 
mote that you can bring j^ourself almost to see the im- 
mediate hand of God ! It is excusable in Americans, 
who have no sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of 
Niagara as the perfection of the sublime ; but it is 
strange that a people who have Birling Gap and Ban- 
try Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a 
cry. 

^Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached 
by the great Chaudiere: the awesome slowness with 
which the deep-green flood, in the center of the Horse- 
shoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf. 



CHAPTEE YII. 

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 

From the gloom of Bufialo, the smoke of Cincinnati, 
and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to 
escape as soon as might be, even had not the death 
from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my 
visit to the "Queen City" warned me to fly north. 
From a stricken tovv^n, with its gutters full of chloride 
of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to 
green Michigan, v\^as a grateful change; but I was 
full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely 



70 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

of all States — Ohio. There is a charm in the park- like- 
beauty of the Mouongahela valley, dotted with vineb 
and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can 
rival. The absence at once of stumps in the corn« 
fields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the 
^'Buckeye State" a look of age that none of the "old 
Eastern States" can show. In corn, in meadow, in 
timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her indian-corn ex- 
ceeds in richness that of any other State; she has 
ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the 
surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, 
tobacco, all are raised ; her Catawba has inspired 
poems. Every river-side is clothed with groves of 
oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, 
and of buckeye. Yet, as I said, the change to the 
Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief; it waa 
Holland after the Ehine, London after Paris. 

Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, ia 
a good sound rule: limestone makes both bone and 
straw. The ^Northwestern States, inhabited by giant 
men, are the chosen home of the most useful and 
beautiful of plants, the maize — in America called 
"corn." For hundreds of miles the railway track, 
protected not oven by a fence or hedge, runs through 
the towering plants, which hide all prospects save that 
of their own green pyramids. Maize feeds the people, 
it feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed 
the cities of the East; from it is made yearly, as an 
Ohio farmer told me, "whisky enough to Hoat the 
ark." Rice is not more the support of the Chinese 
than maize of the English in America. 

In the great corn-field of the ]!Torthwestern States, 
dwells a people without a history, without tradition, 
busy at hewing out of the forest trunks codes and 
social usages of its own. The Kansas men havtj set 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 71 

themselves to emancipating women; the " AVolver- 
ines," as the people of Michigan are called, have 
turned their heads to education, and are teaching the 
teachers upon this point. 

The rapidity with which intellectual activity is 
awakened in the West is inexplicable to the people 
of New England. While you are admiring the laws 
of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you 
that the resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of 
Connecticut is consequent only on the fact, that the 
framers of the former possessed a copy of this one 
New England code, while they had never set eyes 
upon the code of any other country in the world. 
While Yale and Harvard are trying in vain to keep 
pace with the State universities of Michigan and 
Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and New Haven 
men who apply an old Russian story to the Western 
colleges, and tell you that their professors of lan- 
guages, when asked where they have studied, reply 
that thej' guess they learned to read and write in 
Springfield. 

One of the difficulties of the New England colleges 
has been to reconcile university traditions with demo- 
cracy; but in the Western States there is neither re- 
conciliation nor tradition, though universities are 
I)lenty. Probably the most democratic school in the 
whole world is the Statf^ University of Michigan, situ- 
ate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, large, 
practical; twelve hundred students, paying only the 
ten dollars entrance fee, and live dollars a year during 
residence, and living where they can in the little town, 
attend the university to be prepared to enter with 
knowledge and resolution upon the afiairs of their fu- 
ture life. A few only are educated by having their 
minds unfolded that they may become many-sided 



72 GREATER BRITAIN, 

men ; but all work with spirit, and witli that earnest- t 
ness which is seen in the Scotch universities at home. 
The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with 
death — Law, Theology, Medicine — these are the three 
foremost of man's employments ; to these, accordingly, 
the university afiords her chiefest care, and to one of 
these the student, his entrance examination passed, 
often gives his entire time. 

These things are democratic, but it is not in them 
that the essential democracy of the university is to be 
seen. There are at Michigan no honor-lists, no classes 
in our sense, no orders of merit, no competition. A 
man takes, or does not take a certain degree. The 
university is governed, not by its members, not by 
its professors, but by a parliament of "regents" ap- 
pointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such are the 
two great principles of the democratic university of 
the "West. 

It might be supposed that these two strange depart- 
ures from the systems of older universities were irreg- 
ularities, introduced to meet the temporary embar- 
rassments incidental to educational establishments in 
young States. So far is this from being the case that, 
as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest-sighted men of the 
older colleges of America are trying to assimilate their 
teaching system to that of Michigan — at least in the 
one point of the absence of competition. They assert 
that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce 
struggle between man and man is unhealthy work, 
difierent in nature and in results from the loving labor 
of men whose hearts are really in what they do: toil, in 
short, not very easily distinguishable from slave labor. 

In the matter of the absence of competition, Michi- 
gan is probably but returning to the system of the Euro- 
pean universities of the Middle Ages, but the govern- 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 73 

ment by other than the members of tlie uuiversit}' is 
a still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look 
to the sources wiience the funds of the university are 
drawn — namely, from the pockets of the taxpayers of 
the State. The men who have set up this corporation 
in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support, 
cannot be called on, they say, to renounce its govern- 
ment to their nominees, professors from E'ew Eng- 
land, unconnected with the State, men of one idea, 
often quarrelsome, sometimes "irreligious." There is 
much truth in these statements of the case, but it is to 
be hoped that the men chosen to serve as *' regents" are 
of a higher intellectual stamp than those appointed to 
educational offices in the Canadian backwoods, A 
report was put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a 
superintendent of instruction writes to the Minister 
of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers of 
Victoria County not in future to elect as school trustees 
men who cannot read or w^rite. As Michigan grows 
older, she will, perhaps, seek to conform to the prac- 
tice of other universities in this matter of her govern- 
ment, but in the point of absence of competition she 
is likely to continue firm. 

Even here some difficulty is found in getting com- 
petent school directors ; one ^ of them reported 31 J 
children attending school. Of another district its su- 
perintendent reports: "Conduct of scholars about the 
same as that of 'Young America' in general." Some 
of the superintendents aim at jocosity, and show no 
want of talent in themselves, while their efforts are to 
demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The su- 
perintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some num- 
bered questions: "Condition good, improvement fair; 
for \ of \ of the year in school, and fifteen-sixteenths 
of the time at play. Male teachers most successful 

t 



74 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

with the birch; female with Cupid's darts. School- 
houses iu fair whittling order. Apparatus: Shovel, 
none; tongs, ditto; poker, one. Conduct of scholars 
like that of parents — good, bad, and indifferent. No 
minister in town — sorry; no lawyer — good!" The 
superintendents of Manlius Township report that Dis- 
tricts 1 and 2 have buildings *'fit (in winter) only for 
the polar bear, walrus, reindeer, Russian sable, or Si- 
berian bat;" and they go on to say: " Our children read 
everything, from Mr. Noodle's Essays on Matrimony to 
Artemus Ward's Lecture on First Principles of Amer- 
ican Government." Another report from a very new 
county runs : '' Sunday-schools afford a little reading- 
matter to the children. Character of matter most 
read — battle, murder, and sudden death." A third 
states that the teachers are meanly paid, and goes on : 
**If the teaching is no better than the pay, it must be 
like the soup that the rebels gave the prisoners." A 
superintendent, repoiling that the success of the teach- 
ers is greater than their qualifications warrant, says : 
"The reason is to be found in the Yankeeish adapta- 
bility of even Wolverines." 

After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the ex- 
pense of the Northwestern people. A population 
who would maintain schools and universities under 
difiiculties apparently overwhelming was the source 
from which to draw Union volunteers such as those 
who, after the war, returned to their Northern homes, 
I have been told, shocked and astonished at the igno- 
rance and debasement of the Southern whites. 

The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan 
is one to which we are year by year tending in the 
English universities. As sciences multiply and deepen, 
it becomes more and more impossible that a "general 
course" scheme can produce men fit to take their 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 75 

places in the world. Cambridge has attempted to set 
up both systems, and, giving her students the choice, 
bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to 
honors, or take a less valued degree requiring some 
slight proficiency in many things. Michigan denies 
that the stimulus of honor examinations should be con- 
nected with the elective system. With her, men first 
graduate in science, or in an arts degree, which bears 
a close resemblance to the English " poll," and then 
pursue their elected study in a course w^hich leads to 
no university distinction, which is free from the strug- 
gle for place and honors. These objections to ^'hon- 
ors" rest upon a more solid foundation than a mere 
democratic hatred of inequality of man and man. Re- 
pute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann 
Arbor man, and the Wolverines do not follow the 
Ephesians, and tell men who excel among them to go 
and excel elsewhere. The Michigan professors saj, 
and Dr. Hedges bears them out, that a far higher av- 
erage of real knowledge is obtained under this system 
of independent work than is dreamt of in colleges 
where competition rules. "A higher average" is all 
they say, and they acknowledge frankly that there is 
here and there a student to be found to whom compe- 
tition would do good. As a rule, they tell us this is 
not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man 
for place is sufficiently the bane of the world not to 
be made the curse of schools : competition breeds every 
evil which it is the aim of education, the duty of a uni- 
versity to suppress: pale faces caused by excessive 
toil, feverish excitement that prevents true work, a 
hatred of the subject on which the toil is spent, jeal- 
ousy of best friends, systematic depreciation of men's 
talents, rejection of all reading that will not "pay," 
extreme and unhealthy cultivation of the memory, 



76 GREATER BRITAIN. 

general degradation of labor — all these evils, and 
many more, are charged npon the competition system. 
Ever3^thing that our professors have to say of *'cram " 
these American thinkers apply to competition. Strange 
doctrines these for young America! 

Of the practical turn which we should naturally ex- 
pect to discover in the university of a bran-new State 
I found evidence in the regulation which prescribes 
that the dearree of Master of Arts shall not be conferred 
as a matter of course upon graduates of three years' 
standing, but only upon such as have pursued profes- 
sional or general scientific studies during that period. 
Even in these cases an examination before some one 
of the faculties is required for the Master's degree. I 
was told that for the medical degree "four years of 
reputable practice" is received, instead of certain 
courses. 

In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as 
merely practical as Swift's University of Brobdinguag; 
but, standing far above the ordinary arts or science 
courses, there is a '' University course" designed for 
those who have already taken the Bachelor's degree. 
It is harder to say what this course includes than 
Avhat it does not. The twenty heads range over phi- 
lology, philosoph}^, art, and science; there is a branch 
of *' criticism," one of "arts of design," one of "line 
arts." Astronomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are 
all embraced in a scheme brought into working order 
wathin ten vears of the time when Michio^an was a 
wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting- 
ground. 

Michigan entered upon education work very earh" 
in her history as a State. In 1850, her legislature 
commissioned the Hon, Ira May hew to prepare a 
work on education for circulation throughout America. 



UNIVEBSITY OF MICHIGAN. 77 

Her progress has been as rapid as her start was good; 
her natural history collection is already one of the 
most remarkable in America; her medical school is 
ahiiost unequaled, and students flow to her even 
from Kew England and from California, while from 
IsTew York she draws a hundred men a year. In only 
one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van: 
she has hitherto followed the New England colleges 
in excluding women. The State University of Kansas 
has not shown the same exclusiveness that has char- 
acterized the conduct of the rulers of Michigan : women 
are admitted not only to the classes, but to the profes- 
sorships at Lawrence. 

This [N^orth western institution at Ann Arbor was 
not behind even Harvard in the war: it supplied the 
Union army with 1000 men. The 17th liegiment of 
Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and 
Ann Arbor students, has no cause to fear the rivalry 
of any other "record;" and such was the effect of the 
war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2G00 male 
to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 
1300 men to 7500 women. 

So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honor, 
that they publish it at full length in the calendar of 
the university. Every '^ class" from the foundation 
of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in 
their country's service during the suppression of the 
rebellion. The Hon. Oramel Hosford, Superintendent 
of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, owing 
to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the 
schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of 
their capacity, while some are compelled to close their 
doors against the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels, 
generals, are among the students now humbly learning 
in the Ann Arbor University Schools. 

1* 



78 GREATER BRITAIN. 

The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that \ 
she has given to her higher teaching; but in no way 
peculiar in the attention she bestows on eclucatioil. 
Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West, 
and each of these young States has established a 
university of the highest order, and placed in every 
township not only schools, but public libraries, sup- 
ported from the rates, and managed by the people. 

Kot only have the appropriations for educational 
purposes by each State been large, but those of the 
Federal government have been upon the most splen- 
did scale. What has been done in the Eastern and 
the Central States no man can tell, but even west of 
the Mississippi twenty-two million acres have already 
been granted for such purposes, while Hftj'-six million 
more are set aside for similar gifts. 

The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan 
traditions. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 

When the companions of the explorer Cartier found 
that th6 rapids at Montreal were not the end of all 
navigation, as they had feared, but that above them 
there commenced a second and boundless reach of 
deep, still waters, they fancied they had found the long- 
looked-for route to China, and cried, ''La Chine!" 
So the story goes, and the name has stuck to the place. 

Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief 
that they were at least the potential possessors of the 



THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 79 

only possible road for the China trade of the future, 
for in that year a Canadian government paper declared 
that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, 
were impassable for raih'oads. Maps showed that from 
St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that 
from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the 
British Pacific ports. 

America has gone through a five years' agony since 
that time; but now, in the first days of peace, we find 
that the American Pacific Railroad, growing at the 
average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one 
mile a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 
1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream. 
Kot only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to 
be passable, but the engineers have found themselves 
compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes 
without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky 
Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling 
gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway 
lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the 
heat of the country, the snow-line lies high ; the chosen 
pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. 
The dryness of the air of the center of a vast continent 
prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. 
At ei2:ht or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the 
Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the 
Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter 
than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Cam- 
den and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand, 
fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless suc- 
cession of smaller snowy chains which have to be 
crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin of the Great 
Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line 
will be an accomplished fact. 
In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, 



80 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete 
their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They 
are completing it at more than three times that rate. 

When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange 
that the road should be pushed with extraordinary en- 
ergy and speed, so numerous are the baits oftered to 
the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to 
be advanced them ; land is to be given them for ^^Qry 
mile they finish — on a generous scale while the line is 
on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches 
the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are esti- 
mated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alter- 
nate sections, a width of four hundred feet, with addi- 
tional room for works and stations, is granted for the 
line. The California Company is tempted by similar 
offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each com- 
pany is struggling to lay the most miles and get the 
most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of 
the Eastern Company that the junction should be as 
far as possible to the west; of the Western, that it 
should be as far as possible to the east. The result is 
an average laying of three, and an occasional construc- 
tion of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress 
at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day 
as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the head- 
quarters "cities" keep moving forward, that at the 
Californian end the superintendent wished me to be- 
lieve that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, 
they threw themselves upon their backs, and held up 
their legs, that they might be tied and thrown into 
the cart for a fresh move. "They are true birds of 
jDassage," he said. 

When the iron trains are at the front, the laying 
will for a short time proceed at the late of nine yards 
in every fifteen seconds; but three or four hundred 



THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 81 

tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon 
the single track, and it is in this that the time is lost. 

The advance carrias^es of the, construction train are 
well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs; but 
even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack 
the ''city upon wheels," or tear up the track, they 
are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the 
machinery can lay it down. *'Soon," as a Denver 
paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City, 
'' the iron horse will snitt' the Alpine breeze upon 
the summit of the Black Hills 9000 feet above the 
sea;" and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce 
and buHalo unknown, the Indians have all but disap- 
peared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, 
and the red men have sullenly followed the buiialo 
to the south, and occupy the country between Kansas 
State and Denver, contenting themselves with pre- 
venting the construction of the Santa F^ and Denver 
routes to California. Both for the end in view, and 
the energy with which it is pursued, the Pacific Rail- 
road will stand first among the achievements of ouf 
times. 

If the end to be kept in view in the construction 
of the first Pacific Railroad line were merely the trafhe 
from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route 
from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas 
route through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud 
Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those 
within the United States ; but the Saskatchewan line 
through British territory, with Halifax and Puget 
Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. 
As it is, the true question seems to be, not the trade 
between the Pacific and Great Britain, but between 
A-sia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must 
be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years. 



82 GEE ATE It BRITAIN. 

Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 
1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in 
less time than by the severest traveling I can reach 
it from Denver in 1866. 

Wherever, in the States, i^Torth and South have met 
in conilict, Xorth has won. New York has beaten 
Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior situation, has 
beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, 
or cities still farther north, will carry oif the trade from 
Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately 
Puget Sound may beat San Francisco in the race for 
the Pacitic trade, and the Southern cities become still 
less able to keep their place than they have been 
hitherto. Time after time, Chicago has thrown out 
intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade 
which seemed of necessity to belong to her-; and the 
success of the Union Pacitic line, and failure of the 
Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of 
the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh 
element enters into the calculation, and declares for 
Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, 
is in these great distances shorter by iifty or a hundred 
miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, 
and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, but 
the shortest route from sea to sea. 

Chicaoco has a c^reat advantage over St. Louis in her 
comparative freedom from the cholera, which yearly 
attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St. 
Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to 
have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by 
flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on 
the river; the sale of fruit and vegetables prohibited; 
prisoners released on condition that they should work 
at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were for- 
bidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, 



THE PACIFIC HAILROAD. 83 

was scattering handbills on every Western railroad 
line, warning immigrants against St. Louis. 

The Missoarians have relied overmuch upon the 
Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads 
are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on 
the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth 
city in America, is probably hj this time the third. 
As a center of thought, political and religious, she 
stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and 
Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of 
streets. 

One of the chief causes of the future wealth of 
America is to be found in the fact that all her "in- 
land" towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies 
between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the 
single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 
miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is 
nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steam- 
boat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, 
from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing 
range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gulf. 
Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold 
this river. 

A great American city is almost invariably placed 
at a point where an important railroad finds an out- 
port on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to rail- 
ways of the Limerick saying about rivers — namely, 
that Providence has everywhere so placed them as 
to pass through the great towns; for in America rail- 
ways precede population, and when mapped out and 
laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is 
no great wonder in this, when we remember that 
158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time 
granted to railroads in America. 

One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few 



84 GREATER BRITAIN. 

lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into 
certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities 
will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations 
or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and popula- 
tion. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted, 
there will be j^ear by year a tendency to multiply lines 
of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and 
seats of trade — a tendency, however, which may be 
more than neutralized by any special circumstances 
w^hich may cause the lines of transit to converge rather 
than run parallel to one another. Of the system of 
costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, 
where we see the creation of Umritsur and the pros- 
perity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal 
line; of the converging system we have excellent in- 
stances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the 
plan of paralled lines in action here in Kansas, and 
causing the comparative equality of progress mani- 
fested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha. The 
coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines 
ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hun- 
dred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, 
founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown 
to be the third or fourth city of the empire. 
-J 'Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for 
the honor of becoming the future capital of the West, 
Leavenworth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, 
an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the 
time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha, 
with its 12,000, two papers, and a single "one-horse" 
theater, though the northern city tied Leavenworth in 
the point of " saloons.*' 

Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, 
Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, each 
praises itself and runs down it3 neighbor. Leaven- 



THE PACIFIC BAILBOAD. 85 

'vorth chiims to be so healthy that when it hitely be- 
came necessary to "inaugurate" the new grave-yard, 
"they had to shoot a man on purpose" — a change since 
the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in 
the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of 
abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Ne- 
braska man, when asked whether the Kansas people 
were fairly honest, said: "Don't know about honest; 
but they do say as how the folk around take in their 
stone fences every night." Lawrence, the State cap- 
ital, which is on the dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly 
says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats 
that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare 
is collected in installments every five minutes through- 
out the trip. Next after the jealousy between two 
Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the ha- 
treds between cities competing for the same trade. 
Omaha has now. the best chance of becoming the cap- 
ital of the far West, but Leavenworth will no doubt 
continue to be the chief town of Kansas. 

The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pis- 
tol-shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and 
development are little interfered with by such incidents 
as these ; and as the village cities are peopled up, the 
pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing west- 
ward, seeking new "locations." " You're the second 
man I've seen this fall! Darn me, if 'taint 'bout time 
to varmose out westerly — y," is the standing joke of 
the " frontier- bars" against each other. 

At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth 
Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited 
the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego 
to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas 
Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space 

8 



86 GREATER BRITAIN. 

remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the 
canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was 
to be at once our prison for six nights, and our fort 
upon wheels against the Indians. 



CHAPTER IX. 

OMPHALISM. 



Dashi5TG through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped 
in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a 
charming scene : a range of huts and forts crowning 
a loiJg, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed 
ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican fork 
wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs. The 
block-house, over which floated the Stars and Stripes, 
was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which 
continents are to measure all their miles; the " capital 
of the universe," or " center of the world." Not that 
it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to 
learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the 
center of its crust also moves : within the last ten 
years it has removed westward into Kansas from Mis- 
so^ari — from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest 
for ceutership is no new thing. Herodotus held that 
Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the 
unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more un- 
fortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of 
their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on 
Greece at noon ; London plumes herself on being the 
"center of the terrestrial globe;'* Boston is the "hub 



MP HAL ISM. 87 

of the hull universe," though the latter claim is less 
physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley the 
Western men seem to have found the physical center 
of the United States, but they claim for the Great 
Plains as well the intellectual as the political leader- 
ship of the whole continent. These hitherto untrod- 
den tracts, they tell you, form the heart of the empire, 
from which the life-blood must be driven to the ex- 
tremities. Geographical and political centers must 
ultimately coincide. 

Connected with this belief is another Western the- 
ory — that the powers of the future must be '' conti- 
nental." Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb all 
Asia and Europe, except Britain, l^orth America is 
already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the 
Mexican and absorption of the Canadians they con- 
sider certain. As for South America, the Californians 
are planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the 
ground that the continental power of South America 
must start from the head-waters of the jj^reat rivers, 
and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the 
Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is 
destined to become the dominant race. 

The success of this omphalism, this government 
from the center, will be brought about, in the Wes^ 
ern belief, by the necessity under which the nations on 
the head-waters of all streams will iind themselves of 
liaving the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true 
that railways are beating rivers, still the railways must 
also lead seaward to the ports, and the need for their 
control is still felt by the producei^ in the center coun- 
tries of the continent. The Upper States must every- 
where command the Lower, and salt-water despotism 
•find its end. 

The Americans of the Valley States, who fought 



88 GBEATEB BHITAIN. 

all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the 
fact that they were battling for the freedom of the 
Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look 
forward to the time when they will have to assert, 
peaceably but with firmness, their right to the free- 
dom of their railways through the Northern Atlantic 
States. Whatever their respect for New England, it 
cannot be expected that they are forever to permit 
Illinois and Ohio to be neutralized in the Senate by- 
Khode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard with New 
England, it will go still harder with New York; and 
the Western men look forward to the day when Wash- 
ington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus 
or Fort Riley. 

The singular widencss of Western thought, always 
verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of 
Western land. The immensity of the continent pro- 
duces a kind of intoxication ; there is moral dram- 
drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth 
of July oration can come up to 'the plain facts con- 
tained in the Land Commissioners' report. The pub- 
lic domain of the United States still consists of one 
thousand five hundred millions of acres ; there are 
two hundred thousand square miles of coal lands in 
fte country, ten times as much as in all the remaining 
world. In the Western territories not yet States, there 
is land sufficient to bear, at the English population 
rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings. 

It is strange to see how the Western countiy dwarfs 
the Eastern States. Buft'alo is called a "Western 
City;" yet from New York to Buffalo is only three 
hundred and fifty miles, and Bufi'alo is but seven hun- 
dred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all 
the United States. On the other hand, from Bufiiialo 
we can go two thousand five hundred miles westv/ard 



OMFHALISM. 89 

without quitting the United States. ** The West" is 
eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will 
soon he eight times as strong. 

The conformation of Korth America is widely dif- 
ferent to that of any other continent on the globe. In 
Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy the center 
point, and shed the waters toward each of the sur- 
rounding seas: confluence is almost unknown. So it 
is in Asia: there the Indus flowing into the Arabian 
Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges into 
the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, 
and the Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their 
rise in the central table-land. In South America, the 
mountains form a wall upon the west, whence the 
rivers flow eastward in parallel lines. In North Amer- 
ica alone are there mountains on each coast, and a 
trough between, into which the rivers flow together, 
giving in a single valley 23,000 miles of navigable 
stream to be plowed by steamships. The map pro- 
claims the essential unity of North America. Political 
geography might be a more interesting study than it 
has yet been made. 

In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the 
five divisions of America: the other three lie before 
me on my way to San Francisco. The eastern slopes 
of the AUeghanies, or Atlantic coast; their western 
slopes; the Great Plains; the Grand Plateau, and the 
Pacific coast — ^these are the five divisions. Fort Riley, 
the center of the United States, is upon the border of 
the third division, the Great Plains. The Atlantic 
coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of the 
Alleghany chain has prevented its being a hinderance 
to the passage of population to the West: the second 
of the divisions is now the richest and most powerful 
of the five: but the wave of immigration is crossing the 

8* 



90 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and 
here at Fort Riley we are upon the limit of civilization. 

This spot is not only the center of the United States 
and of the continent, but, if Denver had contrived to 
caiT}^ the Pacific Railroad by the Berthoud Pass, would 
have been the center station upon what Governor Gil- 
pin, of Colorado, calls the ^'Asiatic and European rail- 
way line." As it is, Columbus in E^ebraska has some- 
what a better chance of becoming the Washington of 
the future than has this block-house. 

Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon 
the plains. IsTo more sycamore and white-oak and 
honey-locust ; no more of the rich deep green of the 
Cottonwood groves; but yellow earth, yellow flowers, 
yellow grass, and here and there groves of giant sun- 
flowers with yellow blooms, but no more trees. 

As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry march- 
ing slowly from the plains toward the fort. Before 
them, at some little distance, walked a sad-faced man 
on foot, in sober riding-dress, with a repeating carbine 
slung across his back. It was Sherman returning from 
his expedition to Santa Fe. 



LETTER FBOM DENVER. 91 



Mr DEAR 



CHAPTER X. 

LETTER FROM DENVER. 

Monday, Zd Sejtemher. 



Here we are, scalps and all. 

On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Hilej, 
and supped at Junction City, the extreme point that 
"civilization" has reached upon the plains. Civiliza- 
tion means whisky: post-offices don't count. 

It was here that it first dawned upon us that we 
were heing charged 600 dollars to guard the United 
States Californian mail, with the compensation of the 
chance of being ourselves able to rob it with impunity. 
It is at all events the case that we, well armed as the 
mail officers at Leavenworth insisted on our beinc:, sat 
inside with forty- two cwt. of mail, in open bags, and 
over a great portion of the route had only the driver 
with us, without whose knowledge we could have read 
all and stolen most of the letters, and with whose 
knowledge, but against whose will, we could have 
carried off the whole, leaving him gagged, bound, and 
at the mercy of the Indians. As it was, a mail-bag 
fell out one day, without the knowledge of either 
Dixon or the driver, who were outside, and I had 
to shout pretty freely before they would pull up. 

On Wednesday we had our last " squar' meal" in 
the shape of a breakfast, at Fort Ellsworth, and soon 
were out upon the almost unknown plains. In the 
morning we caught up and passed long wagon trains, 
each wagon drawn by eight oxen, and guarded by 



92 GREATER BRITAIN. 

two drivers and one horseman, all armed with breech- 
heading riiies and revolvers, or with the new " re- 
peaters," before which breech-loaders and revolvera 
must ahke go down. All day we kept a sharp look- 
out tor a party of seven American officers, who, in 
defiance of the scout's advice, had gone out from the 
fort to hunt butialo upon the track. About sundown 
we came into the little station of Lost Creek. The 
ranchmen told us that Ihey had, during the day, been 
driven in from their work by a party of Cheyennes, 
and tliat they had some doubts as to the wisdom of the 
officers in going out to hunt. 

Just as we were leaving the station, one of the 
officers' horses dashed in riderless, and was caught; 
and about two miles from the station we passed 
another on its back, ripped up either by a knife or 
buffiilo horn. The saddle was gone, but there were 
no other marks of a fight. We believe that these 
officers were routed by buffiilo, not Cheyennes, but 
still we should be glad to hear of them. 

The track is marked in many parts of the plains by 
stakes, such as those from which the Llano Estacado 
takes its name; but this evening we turned off into de- 
vious lines by way of precaution against ambuscades, 
coming round through the sandy beds of streams to 
the ranches for the change of mules. The ranchmen 
were always ready for us; for, while w^e were still a 
mile away, our driver would put his hand to his 
mouth, and give a "How! how! how! how — w !" 
the Cheyenne warhoop. 

I'l the weird glare that follows sunset we came upon 
a pile of rocks, admirably fitted for an ambush. As 
we neared them, the driver said: "It's 'bout an even 
chance thet we's sculp ther'!" We could not avoid 
them, as there was a gully that could only be crossed 



LETTEB FBOM DENVER. 93 

at this one point. We dashed down into the '^ creek" 
and np again, past the rocks: there were no Indians, 
but the driver was most uneasy till we reached Big 
Creek. 

Here they couki give us nothing whatever to eat, 
the Indians having, on Tuesday, robbed them of every- 
thing they had, and ordered thera to leave within 
fifteen days on pain of death. 

For 250 miles westward from Big Creek we found 
that every station had been warned (and most plun- 
dered) by bands of Cheyennes, on behalf of the forces 
of the confederation encamped near the creek itself. 
The warnino* was in all cases that of fire and death at 
the end of fifteen days, of which nine days have ex- 
pired. We found the horse-keepers of the company 
everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in conse- 
quence, verj^ nearly starved, having been unsuccessful 
in our shots from the " coach," except, indeed, at the 
snakes. 

On Thursday we passed Big Timber, the only spot 
on the plains where there are trees ; and there the In- 
dians had counted the trunks and solemnly warned the 
men against cutting more: " Fifty-two tree. You no 
cut more tree — no more cut. Grass! You cut grass; 
grass make big fire. You good boy — you clear out. 
Fifteen day, we come: 3^ou no gone — ugh!" The 
*'Ligh" accompanied by an expressive pantomime. 

On Thursday evening we got a meal of bufialo and 
prairie dog, the former too strong for my tailing stom- 
ach, the latter wholesome nourishment, and lit for 
kings — as like our rabbit in flavor as he is in shape. 
This was at the horse-station of ''The Monuments," a 
natural temple of awesome grandeur, rising from the 
plains like a giant Stonehenge. 

On Friday we "breakfasted" at Pond Creek sta- 



94 GREATER BRITAIN. 

tion, two miles from Fort Wallis. Here the people 
had applied for a guard, and had been answered: 
"Come into the fort; we can't spare a man." So 
much for the value of the present forts ; and yet even 
these — Wallis and Ellsworth — are 200 miles apart. 

We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock, in- 
terpreter to the fort, — a long-haired, wild-eyed half- 
breed, — who gave its, in an hour's talk, the full history 
of the Indian politics that have led to the present war. 

The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in 
council ^vith the Washington Commissioners all this 
summer at Fort Laramie ; and, after being clothed, fed, 
and armed, lately concluded a treaty, allowing the 
running on the mail-roads. They now assert that this 
treaty was intended to apply to the Platte road (from 
Omaha and Atchison through Fort Kearney), and to 
the Arkansas road, but not to the Smoky Hill road, 
which lies between the others, and runs through the 
bulialo country; but their real opposition is to the rail- 
road. The Cheyennes (pronounced Shians) have got the 
Camanches, Appaches, and Arrapahoes from the south, 
and the Sioux and Kiowas from the north, to join them 
in a confederation, under the leadership of Spotted 
Dog, the chief of the Little Dog section of the Chey- 
ennes, and sou of White Antelope, — killed at Sand 
Creek battle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers, 
— who has sworn to avenge his father. 

Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a dis- 
tance three mounted "braves," leading some horses; 
and when we reached the next station, we found that 
they had been there openly proclaiming that their 
mounts had been stolen from a team. 

All this. day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the 
mail-bags in front of us, and our driver also had his 
armory conspicuously displayed, while we swept the 



LETTER FEOM DENVER. 95 

plains with man^^ an anxious glance. We were on 
lofty rolling downs, and to the south the eye often 
ranged over much of the 130 miles which lay between 
us and Texas. To the north the view was more 
bounded ; still, our chief danger lay near the boulders, 
which here and there covered the plains. 

All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the 
buffalo, in herds of about 300, and the *' antelope" — 
the prong-horn, a kind of gazelle — in Hocks of six or 
seven. Prairie dogs were abundant, and wolves and 
black-tail deer in view at every turn. 

The most singular of all the sights of the plains is 
the constant presence every few yards of the skeletons of 
buffalo and of horse, of mule and of ox; the former left 
by the hunters, who take hut the skin, and the latter 
the losses of the mails and the wagon-trains through 
sunstroke and thirst. We killed a horse on the second 
day of our journey. 

When we came upon oxen that had not long been 
dead, we found that the intense dryness of the air had 
made mummies of them: there was no stench,no putre- 
faction. 

During the day I made some practice at antelope 
with the driver's Ballard ; but an antelope at 600 yards 
is not an easy target. The driver shot repeatedly at 
bufialo at twenty yards, but this only to keep them 
awf.y from the horses ; the revolver balls did not seem 
to go through their hair and skin, as they merely 
shambled on in their usual happy sort of way, after 
receiving a discharge or two. 

The prairie dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops 
of their mounds, but we were too grateful to them for 
their gayety to dream of pistol-shots. They are no 
*'dogs" at all, but rabbits that bark, with all the co- 
ney's tricks and turns, and the same odd way of rub- 



96 GEE ATE B BRITAIN. 

bing their face with their paws while they con you 
from top to toe. 

With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, dogs, 
plover, curlew, dottrel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes, 
and locusts, we never seemed to be without a million 
companions in our loneliness. 

From Chevenne Wells, where we chano^ed mules in 
the afternoon, we brought on the ranchman's wife, 
painfully making room for her at our own expense. 
Her husband had been warned by the Cheyennes that 
the place would be destroyed: he meant to stay, but 
w^as in fear for her. The Cheyennes had made her 
cook for them, and our supper had gone down Chey- 
enne throats. 

Soon after leaving the station, we encountered one 
of the great *' dirt-storms" of the plains. About 5 p.m. 
I saw a little white cloud growing into a column, which 
in half an hour turned black as night, and possessed 
itself of half the skies. We then saw wdiat seemed to 
be a waterspout; and, though no rain reached us, I 
think it was one. When the storm burst on us we 
took it for rain, and halting, drew down our canvas 
and held it against the hurricane. We soon found 
that our eyes and mouths were full of dust ; and when 
I put out my hand I felt that it was dirt, not rain, that 
was falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark, and 
after the fall had continued for some time, there began 
a series of flashes of blinding lightning, in the very 
center and midst of which we seemed to be. Not- 
withstanding this, there was no sound of thunder. 
The " norther" lasted some three or four hours, and 
when it ceased, it left us total darkness, and a wind 
which froze our marrow as we again started on our 
way. When Fremont explored this route, he reported 
that the high ridge between the Platte and Arkansas 



LETTER Fit 031 DENVEB. 97 

was notorious among the Indians for its tremendous 
dirt-storms. Sheet lio^htnino^ without thunder accom- 
panies dust-storms in all great continents ; it is as com- 
mon in the Punjab as in Australia, in South as in North 
America. 

On Saturday morning, at Lake station, we got be- 
yond the Indians, and into a land of plenty, or at all 
events a land of something, for we got milk from the 
station cow, and preserved fruits that had come round 
through Denver from Ohio and Kentucky. J^ot even 
on Saturday, however, could we get dinner, and as I 
missed the only antelope that came within reach, our 
supper was not much heavier than our breakfixst. 

Rolling through the Arrapahoe country, where it is 
proposed to make a reserve for the Cheyennes, at eight 
o'clock on Saturday morning we caught sight of the 
glittering snows of Pike's Peak, a hundred and fifty 
miles away, and all the day we were galloping toward 
it, through a country swarming with rattlesnakes and 
vultures. Late in the evening, when we were drawing 
near to the first of the Coloradan farms, we came on a 
white wolf unconcernedly taking his evening prowl 
about the stock-yards. He sneaked along without 
taking any notice of us, and continued his thief-like 
walk with a bravery that seemed only to show that he 
had never seen man before; this might well be the 
case, if he came from the south, near the upper forks 
of the Arkansas. 

All this, and the frequency of buffalo, I was un- 
prepared for. I imagined that though the plains were 
uninhabited, the game had all been killed. On the 
contrary, the *' Smoky district" was never known so 
thronged with buffalo as it is this year. The herds 
resort to it because there they are close to the water 
of the Platte River, and yet out of the reach of the 

9 



98 GREATER BRITAIN. 

traffic of the Platte road. The tracks they make in trav- 
eling to and fro across the plains are visible for years 
after they have ceased to use them. I have seen them 
as broad and as straight as the linest of Roman roads. 

On Sunday, at two in the morning, we dashed into 
Denver; and as we reeled and staggered from our late 
prison, the ambulance, into the "cockroach corral" 
which does duty for the bar-room of the "Planters' 
House," we managed to find strength and wordu to 
agree that we would ^x. no time for meeting the next 
day. We expected to sleep for thirty hours ; as it was, 
we met at breakfast at seven a.m., less than live hours 
from the time we parted. It is to-day that we feel ex- 
hausted; the exhilaration of the mountain air, and the 
excitement of frequent visits, carried us through yes- 
terday. Dixon is suffering from strange blains and 
boils, caused by the unwholesome food. 

We have been called upon here by Governor Gilpin 
and Governor Cummings, the opposition governors. 
The former is the elected governor of the State of Col- 
orado which is to be, and would have been but for the 
fact that the President put his big toe (Western for veto) 
upon the bill ; the latter, the Washington-sent governor 
of the Territory. Gilpin is a typical pioneer man, and 
the descendant of a line of such. He comes of one of 
the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, and he and 
his ancestors have ever been engaged in founding 
States, He himself, after taking an active share in 
the foundation of Kansas, commanded a regiment of 
cavalry in the Mexican war. After this, he was at the 
head of the pioneer army which explored the pares of 
the Cordilleras and the Territory of Nevada. He it 
was who hit upon the glorious idea of placing Colorado 
half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. There never, 
in the history of the world, was a grander idea than 



LETTER FROM DENVER. 99 

this. Any ordinary pioneer or politician would have 
given Colorado the "natural" frontier, and have tried 
for the glory of the foundation of two States instead of 
one. The consequence would have been, lasting dis- 
union between the Pacific and Atlantic States, and a 
possible future break-up of the country. As it is, 
this commonwealth, little as it at present is, links sea 
to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong. 

The city swarms with Indians of the bands com- 
manded by the chiefs ISTevara and Collorego. They 
are at war with the six confederate tribes, and with 
the Pawnees — with all the plain Indians, in short. 
Now, as the Pawnees are also at war with the six 
tribes, there is a pretty triangular fight. They came 
in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look. 
Short, flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue, 
and dressed in a gaudy costume, half Spanish, half 
Indian, which makes their filthiness appear more filth}'' 
by contrast, and themselves carrying only their Ballard 
and Smith-and- Wesson, but forcing the squaws to carry 
all their other goods, and papooses in addition, they 
present a spectacle of unmixed ruffianism which I 
never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, both oi 
us, left London with "Lo! the poor Indian," in all his 
dignity and hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of 
nobility in our hearts. Our views were shaken in the 
East, but nothing revolutionized them so rapidly as our 
three days' risk of scalping in the plains. John How- 
ard and Mrs. Beecher Stowe themselves would go in 
for the Western "disarm at any price, and exterminate 
if necessary" policy if they lived long in Denver. One 
of the braves of N^evara's command brought in the 
scalp of a Cheyenne chief taken by him last month, 
and to-day it hangs outside the door of a pawnbroker's 
shop, for sale, fingered by every passer-by. 



100 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Many of the band were engaged in putting on their 
paint, which was bright vermilion, with a little indigo 
round the eye. This, with the sort of pigtail which 
they wear, gives them the look of the gnomes in the 
introduction to a London pantomime. One of them — 
Nevara himself, I was told—wore a sombrero with 
three scarlet plumes, taken probably from a Mexican, 
a crimson jacket, a dark-blue shawl, worn round the 
loins and over the arm in Spanish dancer fashion, and 
embroidered moccasins. His squaw was a vermilion- 
faced bundle of rags, not more than four feet high, 
staggering under buffalo hides, bow and arrows, and 
papoose. They move everywhere on horseback, and 
in the evening withdraw in military order, with ad- 
vance and rear guard, to a camp at some distance from 
the town. 

I inclose some prairie flowers, gathered in my walks 
round the city. Their names are not suited to their 
beauty ; the large white one is " the morning blower," 
the most lovely of all, save one, of the flowers of the 
plains. It grows with man}" branches to a height of 
some eighteen inches, and bears from thirty to fifty 
blooms. The blossoms are open up to a little after 
sunrise, when they close, seldom to open even after 
sunset. It is, therefore, peculiarly the early riser's 
flower; and if it be true that Nature doesn't make 
things in vain, it follows that Nature intended men — 
or, at all events, some men —to get up early, which is a 
point that I believe was doubtful hitherto. 

For the one prairie flower which I think more beau- 
tiful than' the blower I cannot find a name. It rises to 
about six inches above ground, and spreads in a circle 
of a foot across. Its leaf is thin and spare ; its flower- 
bloom a white cup, about two inches in diameter ; and 
its buds pink and pendulent. 



LETTER FROM DENVER. 101 

All our garden annuals are to be found in masses 
acres in size upon the plains. Penstemon, coreopsis, 
persecaria, yucca, dwarf sumach, marigold, and sun- 
flower, all are flowering here at once, till the country 
is ablaze with gold and red. The coreopsis of our 
gardens they call the " rosin-weed,'' and say that it 
forms excellent food for sheep. 

The view of the " Cordillera della Sierra Madre," 
the Rocky Mountain main chain, from the outskirts of 
Denver is sublime; that from the roof at Milan does 
not approach it. Twelve miles from the city the mount- 
ains rise abruptl}^ from the plains. Piled range above 
range with step-like regularity, they are topped by a 
long w^hite line, sharply relieved against the indigo of 
the sky. Two hundred and fifty miles of the mother 
Sierra are in sight from our veranda; to the south, 
Pike's Peak and Spanish Pejtk ; Long's Peak to the 
north ; Mount Lincoln towering above all. The views 
are limited onW by the curvature of the earth, such is 
the marvelous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect 
at once of the distance from the sea and of the bed of 
limestone which underlies the plains. 

The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as 
well as loveliness. The sky is brilliantly blue, and 
cloudless from dawn till noon. In the mid-day heats, 
cloud-making in the Sierra begins, and by sunset the 
snowy chain is multiplied a hundred times in curves 
of white and purple cumuli, while thunder rolls heavily 
along the range. ''This is a great country, sir," said 
a Coloradan to me to-day. " We make clouds for the 
whole universe." At dark there is dust or thunder- 
storm at the mountain foot, and then the cold and 
brilliant night. Summer and winter it is the same. 

9* 



102 GREATER BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER XI 

RED INDIA. 

" These Red Indians are not red," was our first cry 
when we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They 
had come into the town to be painted as English ladies 
go to London to shop; and we saw them engaged 
within a short time after their arrival in daubing their 
cheeks with vermilion and blue, and referring to 
glasses which the squaws admiringly held. Still, when 
we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had 
seen that their color was brown, copper, dirt, anything 
3'ou please except red. 

The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Indian Lo- 
rette, were French in training if not in blood; the Pot- 
tawatomies of St. Mary's Mission, the Delawares of 
Leavenworth, are tame Indians: it is true that they 
can hardly be called red; but still I had expected to 
have found these wild prairie and mountain Indians of 
the color from which they take their name. Save for 
paint, I found them of a color wholly different from 
that which we call red. 

Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tar- 
tar-faced, the Indians of the plains are a distinct peo- 
ple from the tall, hook-nosed warriors of the Eastern 
States. It is impossible to set eyes on their women 
without being reminded of the dwarf skeletons found 
in the mounds of Missouri and Iowa; but, men or 
women, the Utes bear no resemblance to the bright- 
eyed, graceful people with' whom Penn traded and 



RED INDIA. 103 

Standish fought. They are not less inferior in mind 
than in body. It was no Shoshon^, no Ute, no Chey- 
enne, who called the rainbow the "heaven of flowers," 
the moon "the night queen," or the stars " God's eyes." 
The plain tribes are as deficient, too, in heroes as in 
poetry: they have never even produced a general, and 
White Antelope is their nearest approach to a Tecum- 
seh. Their mode of life, the natural features of the 
country in which they dwell, have nothing in them to 
suggest a reason for their debased condition. The 
reason must lie in the blood, the race. 

All who have seen both the Indians and the Poly- 
nesians at home must have been struck with innumer- 
able resemblances. The Maori and Red Indian wakes 
for the dead are identical ; the Californian Indians wear 
the Maori mat; the "medicine" of the Mandan is but 
the " tapu" of Polynesia; the I^ew Zealand dance-song, 
the Maori tribal scepter, were found alike by Strachey 
in Virginia and Drake in California; the canoes of the 
West Indies are the same as those of Polynesia. 
Hundreds of arguments, best touched from the farther 
side of the Pacific, concur to prove the Indians a Poly- 
nesian race. The canoes that brought to Easter Island 
the people who built their mounds and rock temples 
there, may as easily have been carried on by the Chilian 
breeze and current to the South American shore. The 
wave from Malaya would have spent itself upon the 
northern plains. The Utes would seem to be Kamt- 
chatkans, or men of the Amoor, who, fighting their 
way round by Behring Straits, and then down south, 
drove a wedge between the Polynesians of Appalachia 
and California. IlsTo theory but this will account for 
the sharp contrast between the civilization of ancient 
Peru and Mexico, and the degradation in which the 
Utes have lived from the earliest recorded times. 



104 OBEATEM BRITAIN. 

Mounds, rock temples, worship, all are alike unknown 
to the Indians of the plains; to the Polynesian Indians, 
these were things that had come down to them from 
all time. 

Curious as is the question of the descent of the 
American tribes, it has no bearing on the future of 
the country — unless, indeed, in the eyes of those who 
assert that Delawares and Utes, Ilurons and Pawnees, 
are all one race, with features modified by soil and cli- 
mate. If this were so, the handsome, rollicking, frank- 
faced Coloradan ^'boys" would have to look forward 
to the time when their sons* sons should be as like the 
Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the 
Indians they expelled — that, as the New Englanders 
are tall, taciturn, and hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of 
the next age should be flat-faced warriors, five feet 
high. Confidence in the future of America must be 
founded on a belief in the indestructible vitality of 
race. 

Kamtchatkans or Polynesians, Malays or sons of 
the prairies on which they dwell, the Red Indians 
have no future. In twenty years there will scarcely 
be one of pure blood alive within the United States. 

In La Plata, the Indians from the inland forests 
gradually mingle with the whiter inhabitants of the 
coast, and become indistinguishable from the re- 
mainder of the population. In Canada and Tahiti, 
the French intermingle with the native race: the 
Ilurons are French in everything but name. In 
Kansas, in Colorado, in New Mexico, miscegenation 
will never be brought about. The pride of race, 
strong in the English everywhere, in America and 
Australia is an absolute bar to intermarriage, and 
even to lasting connections with the aborigines. What 
has happened in Tasmania and Victoria is happening 



RED INDIA. 105 

in iN'ew Zealand and on the plains. When you ask 
a Western man his views on the Indian question, he 
says: "Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of 
war, or thin 'em out by whisky; but the thinning 
process is plaguy slow." 

There are a good many Southerners out upon the 
plains. One of them, describing to me how in Florida 
they had hunted down the Seminoles with blood- 
hounds, added, "And sarved fche pesky sarpints right, 
sah!" Southwestern volunteers, campaigning against 
the Indians, have been known to hang up in their 
tents the scalps of the slain, as we English used to 
nail up the skins of the Danes. 

There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the 
Americans than with ourselves. In 1840, the British 
government assumed the sovereignty of New Zealand 
in a proclamation which set forth with great precision 
that it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the 
aborigines in the possession of their lands. The 
Maories numbered 200,000 then; they number 20,000 
now. 

Among the Western men there is no difference of 
opinion on the Indian question. Rifle and revolver 
are their only policy. The JSTew Englanders, who are 
all for Christianity and kindliness in their dealings 
with the red men, are not similarly united in one cry. 
Those who are ignorant of the nature of the Indian, 
call out for agricultural employment for the braves; 
those who know nothing of the Indian's life demand 
that "reserves" be set aside for him, forgetting that 
no "reserve" can be large enough to hold the buffalo, 
and that without the buffalo the red men must plow 
or starve. 

Indian civilization through the means of agricul- 
ture is all but a total failure. The Shawnees are 



106 GREATER BRITAIN. 

thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatoraies living 
at St. Mary's mission, the Delav^ares existing at 
Leavenworth; but in all these cases there is a large 
infusion of white blood. The Canadian Hurons are 
completely civilized; but then they are completely 
French. If you succeed with an Indian to all ap- 
pearance, he will suddenly return to his untamed 
state. An Indian girl, one of the most orderly of 
the pupils at a ladies' school, has been known, on 
feeling herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, 
let down her back hair, paint her face, and howl. The 
same tendency showed itself in the case of the Dela- 
ware chief who built himself a white man's house, 
and lived in it thirty years, but then suddenly set 
up his old wigwam in the dining-room, in disgust. 
Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who visited 
Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young 
Englishman, who came out soon after, told the Presi- 
dent that he was going West, he gave him a letter 
to the chief, then with his tribe in iTorthern Kansas. 
The Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely 
protested eternal friendship, slept upon it, and next 
morning scalped his visitor with his own hand. 

The English everywhere attempt to introduce civili- 
zation, or to modify that which exists, in a rough-and- 
veady manner which invariably ends in failure or in 
the destruction of the native race. A hundred years 
of absolute rule, mostly peaceable, have not, under 
every advantage, seen the success of our repeated at- 
tempts to establish trial by jury in Bengal. For twenty 
years the Maories have mixed with the Xew Zealand 
colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost univer- 
sally professed themselves Christians, have attended 
English schools, and learnt to speak the English lan- 
guage, and to read and write their own; in spite of all 



1 



RED INDIA, 107 

this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst were enough to 
reduce almost the whole race to a condition of degraded 
«»avagerj. The Indians of America have, within the 
few last years, been caught and caged, given acres 
where they once had leagues, and told to plow where 
once they hunted. A pastoral race, with no concep- 
tion of property in land, they have been manufactured 
into freeholders and tenant farmers; Western Ishmael- 
ites, sprung of a race which has wandered since its 
legendary life begins, they have been subjected to 
homestead laws and title registrations. If our experi- 
ments in New Zealand, in India, on the African coast 
have failed, cautious and costly as they Avere, there can 
be no great wonder in the unsuccess that has attended 
the hurried American experiments. It is not for us, 
who have the past of Tasmania and the present of 
Queensland to account for, to do more than record the 
fact that the Americans are not \more successful with 
the red men of Kansas than we with the black men of 
Australia. 

The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject 
for civilization than the red man ; the Ute is not even 
gifted with the birthright of most savages, the mimetic 
power. The black man, in his dress, his farming, his 
religion, his family life, is always trying to imitate the 
white. In the Indian there is none of this: his ances- 
tors roamed over the plains — he will roam; his ances- 
tors hunted — why should not he hunt? The American 
savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative; the 
African changeable, and strong in imitative faculties 
of the mind. Just as the Indian is less versatile than 
the negro, so, if it were possible gradually to change 
his mode of life, slowly to bring him to the agricul- 
tural state, he would probably become a skillful and 
laborious cultivator, and worthy inhabitant of the 



108 GBEATER BltlTAIN. 

Western soil ; as it is, he is exterminated before he has 
time to learn. "Sculp 'em fust, and then talk to 'em,*' 
the Coloradans say. 

Peace commissioners are yearly sent from Wash- 
ington to treat with hostile tribes upon the plains. 
The Indians invariably continue to fight and rob till 
winter is at hand ; but when the snows appear, they 
send in runners to announce that they are prepared to 
make submission. The commissioners appoint a place, 
and the tribe, their relatives, allies, and friends, come 
down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which 
are purposely prolonged till spring. All this time the 
Indians are kept in food and drink; whisky even is 
illegally provided them, with the cognizance of the 
authorities, under the name of " hatchets." Blankets, 
and, it is said, powder and revolvers, are supplied to 
them as necessary to their existence on the plains; but 
when the first of the spring flowers begin to peep up 
through the snow-drifts on the prairies, they take their 
leave, and in a few weeks are out again upon the war- 
path, plundering and scalping all the whites. 

Judging from English experience in the north, and 
Spanish in Mexico and South America, it would seem 
as thouffh the white man and the red cannot exist on 
the same soil. Step by step the English have driven 
back the braves, till New Englanders now remember 
that there were Indians once in Massachusetts, as we 
remember that once there were bears in Hampshire. 
King Philip's defeat by the Connecticut volunteers 
seems to form part of the early legendary history of 
our race; yet there is still standing, and in good re- 
pair, in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, a frame-house 
which in its time has been successfully defended against 
Red Indians. On the other hand, step by step, since 
the days of Cortez^ the Indians and half-bloods have 



RED INDIA. 109 

driven out the Spaniards from Mexico and South 
America. White men, Spaniards, received Maximilian 
at Vera Cruz, but he was shot by full-blooded Indians 
at Queretaro. 

If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians 
that remain, it must be worked out in the Eastern 
States. Hitherto the whites have but pushed back the 
Indians westward: if they would rescue the remnant 
from starvation, they must bring them East, away 
from Western men and Western hunting-grounds, and 
let them intermingle with the whites, living, farming, 
along with them, intermarrying, if possible. The 
'hunting Indian is too costly a being for our age; but 
we are bound to remember that ours is the blame of 
having failed to teach him to be something better. 

After all, if the Indian is mentally, morally, and 
physically inferior to the white man, it is in every way 
for the advantage of the world that the next genera- 
tion that inhabits Colorado should consist of whites 
instead of reds. That this result should not be brought 
about by cruelty or fraud upon the now existing In- 
dians is all that we need require. The gradual extinc- 
tion of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, 
but a blessing to mankind. 

The Indian question is not likely to be one much 
longer: before I reached England again, I learnt that 
the Coloradan capital had oftered "twenty dollars 
a piece for Indian scalps with the ears on." 



10 



110 ORE ATE R BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER XXL 

COLORADO. 

"W dEN you have once set eyes upon the never-ending 
sweop of the Great Plains, you no longer wonde:* that 
America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of 
Virginia, "Here is ground enough to satisfj'' the most 
covetous and wide affection." The freedom of these 
grand countries was worth the tremendous conflict in 
which it was, in reality, the foremost question; their 
future is of enormous moment to America. 

Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a 
country's value, to despise no feature of the landscape; 
that of the plains is fall of life, full of charm — lonely, 
indeed, but never wearisome, l^ow great rolling up- 
lands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; 
there is all the grandeur of monotony, and yet con- 
tinual change. Sometimes the grand distances are 
broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there 
is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze ; the 
air is bracing even when most hot; the sky is cloud- 
less, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can 
paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea 
of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the 
plains. 

Maps do not remove the impression produced by 
views. The Arkansas River, which is born and dies 
within the limit of the plains, is two thousand miles 
in leugth, and is navigable for eight hundred miles. 
The Platte and Yellowstone are each of them as long. 



COLOBADO. Ill 

Into the plains and plateau jou could put all India 
twice. The impression is not merely one of size. 
There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the 
lonely steppe; no patriotism, no love of home, can pre- 
vent the traveler wishing here to end his days. 

To those who love the sea, there is a double charm. 
!N^ot only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of 
the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the ab- 
sence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the 
sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the 
ocean, the eifect of which is we are always expecting 
to hail it from off the top of the next hillock. 

The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been re- 
marked by Coloradan writers; it may be traced much 
farther than they have carried it. JSTot only are the 
earth, air, and w^ater much alike, but in Colorado, as 
in Bokhara, there are oil wells and mud volcanoes. 
The color of the landscape is, in summer, green and 
flowers; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers 
ever. 

The eastern and western portions of the plains are 
not alike. In Kansas the grass is tall and rank; the 
ravines are filled with cotton wood, hickory, and black 
walnut; here and there are square miles of sunflow-ers, 
from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we 
found that the sunflowers dw^indled, and at Denver 
they are only from three to nine inches in height, the 
oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sunflowers 
for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the 
eastern plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the win- 
ter they work to the west in search of the sweet and 
juicy "blue grass," which they rub out from under the 
snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as 
hair, and so short that, as the story goes, you must 
lather before you can mow it. The '^blue grass" has 



112 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a single 
night araoDg the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp 
turf at once springs up, and holds the ground forever. 

The most astounding feature of these plains is 
their capacity to receive millions, and, swallowing them 
up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast and silent, 
ferti.e yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have 
room for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all 
the teeming multitudes that have poured and can 
pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe. 
Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more 
habitable, nature has been placed here hedgeless, 
gateless, free to all — a green field for the support of 
half the human race, unclaimed, untouched, awaiting 
smiling, hands and plow. 

There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in 
India, the rivers depend on the melting of distant 
snows for their supplies, and in the hot weather are 
represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot 
and dry is a great portion of the land, that crops 
require irrigation. Water for drinking purposes is 
scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are some- 
what costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply 
from common wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may 
in part account for the Western mode of " prospect- 
ing" after water, under which it is agreed that if none 
be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh 
spot. The thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad 
water at nine feet than good at eleven. 

Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as 
those we are building in Victoria, is but a question of 
cost and time. The never-failing breezes of the plains 
maybe utilized for water-raising, and with water all 
is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread 
as it is with soda, it has been found, as it has befn by 



COLORADO. 113 

French farmers in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the 
more alkali the better corn crop. 

When fires are held in check by special enactments, 
such as those which have been passed in Victoria and 
South Australia, and the waters of the winter streams 
retained for summer use by tanks and dams; when 
artesian wells are frequent and irrigation general, belts 
of timber will become possible upon the plains. Once 
planted, these will in their turn mitigate the extremes 
of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of evap- 
oration, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain, 
and steam will soon be available for pumping water 
out of wells, for there is a great natural store of brown 
coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver, so that all 
would be well were it not for the locusts — the scourge 
of the plains — the second curse. The coming of the 
chirping hordes is a real calamity in these far-western 
countries. Their departure, whenever it occurs, is offi- 
cially announced by the governor of the State. 

I have seen a field of indian-corn stripped bare of 
every leaf and cob by the crickets; but the owner told 
me that he found consolation in the fact that they ate 
up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no cure. 
The plovers may eat a few billions, but, as a rule, Coh)- 
radans must learn to expect that the locusts will in- 
crease with the increase of the crops on which they 
feed. The more corn, the more locusts — the more 
plovers, perhaps ; a clear gain to the locusts and plo- 
vers, but a dead loss to the farmers and ranchmen. 

The Coloradan "boys" are a handsome, intelligent 
race. The mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood has here 
produced a generous and noble manhood ; and the 
freedom from wood, and consequent exposure to wind 
and sun, has exterminated ague, and driven away the 
hatchet-face ; but for all this, the Coloradans may have 

10* 



114 ORE ATE R BRITAIN. 

to succumb to the locusts. At present they afiect to 
despise them. "How may you get on in Colorado?" 
said a Missourian one day to a " boy" that was up at 
St. Louis. "Purty well, guess, if it warn't for the in- 
sects." ''What insects? Crickets?" "Crickets! Wall, 
guess not — -jess insects like: rattlesnakes, panther, bar, 
catamount, and sichlike." 

" The march of empire stopped by a grasshopper" 
would be a good heading for a Denver paper, but would 
not represent a fact. The locusts may alter the step, 
but not cause a halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are 
•not; already thousands are pastured round Denver on 
the natural grass. For horses, for merino sheep, these 
rolling table-lands are peculiarly adapted. The New 
Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole 
of this vast region — Dutch clover, French lucern, could 
replace the Indian grasses, and four sheep to the acre 
would seem no extravagant estimate of the carrying 
capability of the lands. The world must come here 
for its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food. 

In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a 
danger. Flocks and herds are the main props of great 
farming, the natural supporters of an aristocracy. Cat- 
tle breeding is inconsistent, if not with republicanism, 
at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous 
classes of two kinds — those who have too many acres, 
as well as those who have too few. The danger at 
least is real, i^othing short of violence or special 
legislation can prevent the plains from continuing to 
be forever that which under nature's farming they 
have ever been — the feeding ground for mighty flocks, 
the cattle pasture of the world. 



ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 115 



CHAPTEKXIIL 

KOCKT MOUNTAINS. 

""What will I do for you if you stop here among us? 
Why, I'll name that peak after you in the next survey," 
said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain 
towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount 
Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however; and as 
for Dixon, there is already a county named after him 
in Nebraska: so off we went along the foot of the 
hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the 
"Cherokee Trail." 

Striking north from Denver by Vasquez Fork and 
Cache la Poudre — called "Cash le Powder," just as 
Mont Royal has become Montreal, and Sault de Ste 
Marie, Soo — we entered the Black Mountains, or East- 
ern foot-hills, at Beaver Creek. On the second day, at 
two in the afternoon, we reached Virginia Dale for 
breakfast, without adventure, unless it were the shoot- 
ing of a monster rattlesnake that lay "coiled in our 
path upon the mountain side." Had we been but a 
few minutes later, we should have made it a halt for 
"supper" instead of breakfast, as the drivers had but 
these two names for our daily meals, at whatever hour 
they took place. Our " breakfasts" varied from 3.30 
A.M. to 2 P.M.; our suppers from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. 

Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the 
river and the territory their name of Colorado, and 
came upon the mountain plateau at the spot where last 
year the Utes scalped seven men only three hours after 



116 ORE A TEE BBITAIN. 

Speaker Colfax and a Congressional party had passed 
with their escort. 

While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie 
Plains, we sighted the Wind River chain drawn by 
Bierstadt in his great picture of the "Rocky Mount- 
ains." The painter lias caught the forms, but missed 
the atmosphere of the range : the clouds and mists 
are those of Maine and Massachusetts ; there is color 
more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of Col- 
orado. 

This was our first sight of the main range since we 
entered the Black Hills, although we passed through 
the gorges at the very foot of Long's Peak. It was 
not till we had reached the rolling hills of "Medicine 
Bow" — a hundred miles beyond the peak — that we 
once more caught sight of it shining in the rear. 

In the night between the second and third days the 
frost was so bitter at the great altitude to which we 
had attained, that we resorted to every expedient to 
keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down 
one of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the 
pencil from my note-book, my eye caught the moon- 
light on the ground, and I drew back saying, " We are 
on the snow." The next time we halted, I found that 
what I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the 
much dreaded alkali. 

In the morning of the third day we found ourselves 
in a country of dazzling white, dotted with here and 
there a tuft of sage-brush — an Artemisia akin to that 
of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the 
^'American desert" — the '-' 31aitvaises terres,'' 

Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and 
sage to sweet waters and sweet grass. Near Bridger's 
Pass and the "divide" between Atlantic and Pacific 
floods, we came on a long valley swept by chilly 



ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 117 

breezes, and almost unfit for human habitation from 
the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with pasture 
ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan 
yak should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out 
that this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes 
of from 4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most 
usefal of all furs, requires less herbage in proportion 
to its weight and size than almost any animal we 
know. 

This Bridger's Pass route is that by which the tele- 
graph line runs, and I was told by the drivers strange 
stories of the Indians and their views on this great 
Medicine. They never destroy out of mere wanton- 
ness, but have been known to cut the wire and then 
lie in ambush in the neighborhood, knowing that re- 
pairing parties would arrive and fall an ea'^iy prey. 
Having come one morning upon three armed over- 
landers lying fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard by 
a fire which coincided \n\\\\ a gap in the posts, but 
which was far from any timber or even scrub, I have 
my doubts as to whether ^' white Indians" have not 
much to do with the destruction of the line. 

From one of the uplands of the Artemisia barrens 
we siglited at once Fremont's Peak on the north, 
and another great snow dome upon the south. The 
unknown mountain was both the more distant and the 
loftier of the two, yet the maps mark no chain within 
eyeshot to the southward. The country on either side 
of this well-worn track is still as little known as when 
Captain Stansbury explored it in 1^50; and when we 
crossed the Green River, as the Upper Colorado is 
called, it was strangle to remember that the stream is 
here lost in a thousand miles of undiscovered vvilds, to 
be found again flowing toward Mexico. ISTear the 
ferry is the place where Albert S. Johnson's mule- 



118 GREATER BRITAIN. 

trains were captured by the Mormons under Genera] 
Lot Smith. 

In the middle of the nio;ht we would come upon 
mule-trains starting on their march in order to avoid 
the mid-day sun, and thus save water, which they are 
sometimes forced to carry with them for as much as 
fifty miles. When we found them halted, they were 
always camped on bluffs and in bends, far from rocks 
and tufts, behind which the Indians might creep and 
stampede the cattle : this they do by suddenly swoop- 
ing down with fearful noises, and riding in among the 
mules or oxen at full speed. The beasts break away 
in their fright, and are driven off before the sentries 
have time to turn out the camp. 

On the fourth day from Denver, the scenery waa 
tame enough, but strange in the extreme. Its charac- 
teristic feature was its breadth. J^o longer the rocky 
defiles of Virginia Dale, no longer the glimpses of the 
main range as from Laramie Plains and the foot-hills 
of Medicine Bow, but great rolling downs like those 
of the plains much magnified. We crossed one of the 
highest passes in the world without seeing snow, but 
looked back directly we were through it on snow-fields 
behind us and all around. 

At Elk Mountain we suffered greatly from the frost, 
but by mid day we were taking off" our coats, and the 
mules hanging their heads in the sun once more, while 
those which should have taken their places were, as 
the ranchman expressed it, " kicking their heels in pure 
cussedness" at a stream some ten miles away. 

While walking before the "hack" through the 
burning sand of Bitter Creek, I put up a bird as big 
as a turkey, which must, I suppose, have been a vul- 
ture. The sage-brush growing here as much as three 
feet high, and as stout and gnarled as century-old 



ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 119 

heather, gave shelter to a few coveys of sage-hens, at 
which we shot without much success, although they 
seldom ran, and never rose. Their color is that of the 
brush itself — a yellowish gray — and it is as hard to see 
them as to pick up a partridge on a sun-dried fallow at 
home in England. Of wolves and rattlesnakes there 
were plenty, but of big game we saw but little, only a 
few black-tails in the day. 

This track is more traveled by trains than is the 
Smoky Hill route, which accounts for the absence of 
game on the line ; but that there is plenty close at 
hand is clear from the way we were fed. Smoky Hill 
starvation was forgotten in piles of steaks of elk and 
antelope ; but still no fruit, no vegetable, no bread, no 
drink save "sage-brush tea," and that half poisoned 
with the water of the alkaline creeks. 

Jerked buffalo had disappeared from our meals. 
The droves never visit the Sierra Madre now, and sci-^ 
entific books have said that in the mountains they were 
ever unknown. In Bridger's Pass we saw the skulls of 
not less than twenty buffalo, which is proof enough 
that they once were here, though perhaps long ago. 
The skin and bones will last about a year after the 
beast has died, for the wolves tear them to pieces to 
get at the marrow within, but the skull they never 
touch ; and the oldest ranchman failed to give me an 
answer as to how long skulls and horns might last. 
We saw no buffalo roads like those across the plains. 

From the absence of buffalo, absence of birds, ab- 
sence of flowers, absence even of Indians, the Rocky 
Mountain plateau is more of a solitude than are the 
plains. It takes days to see this, for you naturally no- 
tice it less. On the plains, the glorious climate, the 
masses of rich blooming plants, the millions of beasts, 
and insects, and birds, all seem prepared to the hand 



120 GBEATEK BBITAIN. 

of man, and for man you are continually searching. 
Each time you round a hill, you look for the smoke of 
the farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do 
on the sea: it is nature's own lone solitude, but from 
no fault of ours — the higher parts of the plateau were 
not made for man. 

Early on the fifth night we dashed suddenly out of 
utter darkness into a mountain glen blazing with fifty 
fires, and perfumed with the scent of burning cedar. 
As many wagons as there were fires were corraled in 
an ellipse about the road, and 600 cattle were pastured 
within the fire-glow in rich grass that told of water. 
Men and women were seated round the camp-fires 
pra^dng and singing hymns. As we drove in, they 
rose and cheered us ^' on your way to Zion." Our Gen- 
tile driver yelled back the warhoop "How! How! 
How^! How — w! We'll give yer love to Brigham;" 
and back went the poor travelers to their prayers 
ao'aiu. It was a bull train of the Mormon immio:ra- 
tion. 

Five minutes after we had passed the camp we were 
back in civilization, and plunged into polygamous so- 
ciety all at once, with Bishop Myers, the keeper of 
Bear River Ranch, drawing water from the well, while 
Mrs. Myers IS'o. 1 cooked the chops, and Mrs. Myers 
No. 2 laid the table neatly. 

The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we 
were warm, and filled our *'hack" with hay, that we 
might continue so, and off we w^ent, inclined to look 
favorably on polygamy after such experience of polyg- 
amists. 

Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o'clock 
in the morning of the sixth day we commenced the 
descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all the gully 
passes of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clear 



BOCKY MOUNTAINS. 121 

that I was able to make some outline sketches of the 
clifis from the ranch where we changed mules. Echo 
Canyon is the Thermopylse of Utah, the pass that the 
Mormons fortified against the United States forces 
under Albert: S. Johnson at the time of " Buchanan's 
raid." Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a 
few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet 
at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side, 
and a mountain wall on the south. Echo Canyon would 
be no easy pass to force. Government will do well to 
prevent the Pacific Railroad from following this defile. 

After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, 
situated in a smiling valley not milike that between 
Martigny and Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kim- 
ball's Ranch, where we once more hitched horses in- 
stead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen 
miles down Big Canyon, the best of all the passes of 
the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our six- 
hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mor- 
mon promised land. 

The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our 
right, lighting up the valley with a silvery gleam from 
Jordan River, and the hills with a golden glow from off 
the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and peaks 
around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range, 
stood out in sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored 
sky. To our left were the Utah Mountains, blushing 
rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in 
orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny- 
distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of 
many droves ; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on 
the lake side, white houses peeped from among the 
peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the 
city. 

Here was Plato's table-land of the Atlantic isle — one 

11 



122 GEE ATE R BRITAIN. 

great field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years 
ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn 
impossible. • 



CHAPTER XIV. 

BRIQHAM YOUNG. 

" I LOOK upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very 
best men that God could send as ministers to those 
unto whom He sent them," wrote Elder Frederick 
Evans, of the " Shaker" village of New Lebanon, in a 
letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction 
to the Mormon president. 

Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief — 
from the great living exponent of the principle of celi- 
bacy to the " most married" in all America — were not 
to he kept undelivered ; so the moment we had bathed 
we posted ofl^ to a merchant to whom we had letters, 
that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and 
military ruler would be home again from his "trip 
north." The answer was, " To-morrow." 

After watching the last gleams fade from the snow 
fields upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I 
had to sleep in a private house, the hotel being filled 
even to the balcony. As I entered the drawing-room 
of my entertainer, I heard the voice of a lady reading, 
and caught enough of what she said to be aware that 
it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased when she 
saw the stranger ; but I found that it was my host's 
first wife reading Belinda Pratt's book to her daughters 
— girls just blooming into womanhood. 



BBIGHAM YOUNG. 123 

After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly 
pleasant as it followed upon a long absence from 
civilization, I went to my room, w^hich I afterward 
found to be that of the eldest son, a youth of sixteen 
years. In one corner stood two Ballard rifles, and 
two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from pegs 
upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands under- 
neath the pillow — an attitude instinctively adopted to 
escape the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt 
it— a full-sized Colt, and capped. Such was my first 
introduction to Utah Mormonism. 

On the morrow, we had the first and most formal 
of our four interviews with tbe Mormon president, the 
conversation lasting three hours, and all the leading 
men of the church being present. When we rose to 
leave, Brigham said: ^'Come to see me here again; 
Brother Stenhouse will show you everything;" and 
then blessed us in these words: "Peace be with you, 
in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ." 

Elder Stenhouse followed us out of the presence, 
and somewhat anxiously put the odd question : "Well, 
is he a white man?" ^' White" is used in Utah as a 
general term of praise: a white man is a man — to use 
our corresponding idiom — not so black as he is painted. 
A "white country" is a country with grass and trees; 
just as a white man means a man who is morally not a 
Ute, so a white country is a land in which others than 
Utes can dwell. 

We made some complimentary answer to Sten- 
house's question; but it was impossible not to feel 
that the real point was : Is Brigham sincere ? 

Brigham's deeds have been those of a sincere man. 
His bitterest opponents cannot dispute the fact that 
in 184.4, when Nauvoo was about to be deserted, 
owing to the attacks of a ruflianly mob, Brigham 



124 GB EATER BRITAIN. 

ruslied to the front, and took the chief command 
To be a Mormon leader then was to be a leader of 
an outcast people, with a price set on his head, in 
a Missourian county in which almost every man who 
was not a Mormon was by profession an assassin. In 
the sense, too, of believing that he is what he pro- 
fesses to be, Brigham is undoubtedly sincere. In the 
wider sense of being that which he professes to be 
he comes off as well, if only we will read his words 
in the way he speaks them. lie tells us that he is 
a prophet — God's representative on earth; but when 
I asked him whether he was of a wholly different 
spiritual rank to that held by other devout men, he 
said: *'By no means. I am a prophet — one of many. 
All good men are prophets; but God has blessed me 
with peculiar favor in revealing His will oftener and 
more clearl}^ through me than through other men." 

Those who would understand Brigham's revelations 
must read Bentham. The leading Mormons are utili- 
tarian deists. "God's will be done," they, like other 
deists, say is to be our rule; and God's will they lind 
in written Revelation and in Utility. God has given 
men, by the actual hand of angels, the Bible, the Book 
of Mormon, the Book of Covenants, the revelation 
upon Plural Marriage. When these are exhausted, 
man, seeking for God's will, has to turn to the princi- 
ple of Utility: that which is for the happines,s of man- 
kind — that is of the church — is God's will, and must be 
done. While Utility is their only index to God's 
pleasure, they admit that the church must be ruled — 
that opinions may differ as to what is the good of the 
church, and therefore the will of God. They meet, 
then, auunally, in an assembly of the people, and elect- 
ing church ofUcers by popular will and acclamation, 
they see God's finger in the ballot-box. They say, 



BRIQHAM YOUNG. 125 

like the Jews in the election of their judges, that the 
choice of the people is the choice of God. This is 
what men like John Taylor or Daniel Wells appear to 
feel; the ignorant are permitted to look upon Brig- 
ham as something more than man, and though Brig- 
ham himself does nothing to confirm this view, the 
leaders foster the delusion. When I asked Stenhouse, 
*'Has Brigham's re-election as prophet ever been op- 
posed?" he answered sharply, ''I should like to see 
the man who'd do it." 

Brigham's personal position is a strange one: he 
calls himself prophet, and declares that he has reve- 
lations from God himself, but when you ask him quietly 
what all this means, you find that for prophet you 
should read political philosopher. He sees that a canal 
from Utah Lake to Salt Lake Valley would be of vast 
utility to the church and people — that a new settle- 
ment is urgently required. He thinks about these 
things till they dominate in his mind, and take 
in his brain the shape of physical creations. He 
dreams of the canal, the city; sees them before him 
in his waking moments. That which is so clearly for 
the good of God's people becomes God's will. Kext 
Sunday at the Tabernacle he steps to the. front, and 
says : " God has spoken ; He has said unto his prophet, 
* Get thee up, Brigham, and build Me a city in the 
fertile valley to the South, where there is water, where 
there are fish, where the sun is strong enough to ripen 
the cotton plants, and give raiment as well as food to 
My saints on earth.' Brethren willing to aid God's 
work should come to me before the Bishops' meeting." 
As the prophet takes his seat again, and puts on his 
broad-brimmed hat, a hum of applause runs round the 
bowery, and teams and barrows are freely promised. 

Sometimes the canal, the bridge, the city may prove 

11* 



126 GREATER BRITAIN, 

a failure, but this is not concealed ; the prophet's hu- 
man tongue may blunder even when he is communi- 
cating holy things. 

"After all," Brigham said to me the day before I 
left, "the highest inspiration is good sense — the know- 
ing what to do, and how to do it." 

In all this it is hard for us, with our English hatred, 
of casuistry and hair-splitting, to see sincerity; still, 
given his foundation, Brigham is sincere. Like other 
political religionists, he must feel himself morally 
bound to stick at nothing when the interests of the 
church are at stake. To prefer man's life or property 
to the service of God must be a crime in such a church. 
The Mormons deny the truth of the murder-stories 
alleged against the Danites, but they avoid doing so 
in sweeping or even general terms — though, if need 
were, of course they would be bound to lie as well as 
to kill in the name of God and His holy prophet. 

The secret polity which I have sketched gives, evi- 
dently, enormous power to some one man within the 
church ; but the Mormon constitution does not very 
clearly point out who that man shall be. With a view 
to the possible future failure of leaders of great per- 
sonal qualifications, the First Presidency consists of 
three members with equal rank; but to his place in the 
Trinity, Brigham unites the office of Trustee in Trust, 
which gives him liie control of the funds and tithing, 
or church taxation. 

All are not ascreed as to what should be Brisfham's 
place in Utah. Stenhouse said one day: "lam one of 
those who think that our President should do every- 
thing. He has made this church and this country, and 
should have his way in all things; saying so gets me 
into trouble with some." The writer of a report of 
Brigham's tour which appeared in the Salt Lake Tele- 



MORMONDOM. 127 

graph the day we reached the city, used the words : 
*•' God never spoke through man more clearly than 
through President Young." 

One day, when Stenhouse was speaking of the moral- 
ity of the Mormon people, he said : "Our penalty for 
adultery is death/' Remembering the Danites, we 
were down on him at once: "Do you inflict it ?" "No; 
but — well, not practically; but really it is so. A man 
who commits adultery withers away and perishes. 
A man sent away from his wives upon a mission that 
may last for years, if he lives not purely — if, ivhen he 
returns, he cannot meet the eye of Briyham, better for him 
to be at once in hell. He withers." 

Brigham himself has spoken in strong words of his 
own power over the Mormon people: "Let the talking 
folk at Washington say, if they please, that I am no 
longer Governor of Utah. I am, and will be Governor, 
until God Almighty says, * Brigham, you need not be 
Governor any more.' " 

Brigham's head is that of a man who nowhere could 
be second. 



CHAPTER XV. 

MORMONDOM. 

We had been presented at court, and favorably re- 
ceived ; asked to call again ; admitted to State secrets 
of the presidency. From this moment our position in 
the city was secured. Mormon seats in the theater 
were placed at our disposal ; the director of immigra- 
tion, the presiding bishop. Colonel Hunter — a grim, 



128 GREATEB BUI TAIN. 

weather-beaten Indian fighter — and his coadjutors, 
carried us oti' to see the reception of the bull-train at 
the Elephant Corral; we were offered a team to take 
us to the Lake, which we refused only because we had 
already accepted the loan of one from a Gentile mer- 
chant; presents of peaches, and invitations to lunch, 
dinner, and supper, came pouriug in upon us from all 
sides. In a single morning we were visited by four of 
the apostles and nine other leading members of the 
church. Ecclesiastical dignitaries sat upon our single 
chair and wash-hand-stand ; and one bed groaned under 
the weight of George A. Smith, "church historian," 
while the other bore ^sop's load — the peaches he had 
brought. These growers of fruit from standard trees 
think but small things of our English wall-fruit, "baked 
on one side and frozen on the other," as they say. There 
is a mellowness about the Mormon peaches that would 
drive our gardeners to despair. 

One of our callers was Captain Hooper, the Utah 
delegate to Congress. He is an adept at the Western 
plan of getting out of a fix by telling you a story. 
When we laughingly alluded to his lack of wives, and 
the absurdity of a monogamist representiug Utah, he 
said that the people at Washington all believed that 
Utah had sent them a polygamist. There is a rule 
that no one with the entry shall take more than one 
lady to the White House receptions. A member of 
Congress was urged by three ladies to take them with 
him. He, as men do, said, "The thing is impossible" 
— and did it. Presenting himself with the bevy at 
the door, the usher stopped him : " Can't pass ; only 
one friend admitted with each member." " Suppose, 
sir, that Tm the delegate from Utah Territory?" said 
the Congressman, "Oh, pass in, sir— pass in," was 
the instant answer of the usher. The story reminds 



MORMONDOM. 129 

me of poor Browne's "family" ticket to his lecture at 
Salt Lake City: "Admit the bearer and one wife." 
Hooper is said to be under pressure at this moment on 
the question of polygamy, for he is a favorite with the 
prophet, who cannot, however, with consistency pro- 
mote him to office in the church on account of a saying 
of his own: "A man with one wife is of less account 
before God than a man with no wives at all." 

Our best opportunity of judging of the Mormon 
ladies was at the theater, which we attended regularly, 
sitting now in Elder Stenhouse's " family" seats, now 
with General "Wells. Here we saw all the wives of the 
leading churchmen of the city ; in their houses, we 
saw only those they chose to show us : in no case but 
that of the Clawson family did we meet in society all 
the wives. We noticed at once that the leading ladies 
were all alike— full of taste, full of sense, but full, at 
the same time, of a kind of unconscious melancholy. 
Everywhere, as you looked round the house, you met 
the sad eye which I had seen but once before — among 
the Shakers at New Lebanon. The women here, know- 
ing no other state, seem to think themselves as happy 
as the day is long: their eye alone is there to show the 
Gentile that they are, if the expression may be allowed, 
unhappy without knowing it. That these Mormon 
women love their religion and reverence its priests is 
but a consequence of its being "their religion"— the 
system in the midst of which they have been brought 
up. Which of us is there who does not set up some 
idol in his heart round which he weaves all that he has 
of poetry and devotion in his character? Art, hero-wor- 
ship, patriotism are forms of this great tendency. That 
the Mormon girls, who are educated as highly as those 
of any country in the world— who, like all American 
girls, are allowed to wander where they please— who 



130 GEE ATE n BRITAIN. 

are certain of protection in any of the fifty Gentile 
houses in the city, and absolutely safe in Camp Doug- 
las at the distance of two miles from the citv-wall 
— all consent deliberately to enter on polygamy — shows 
clearly enough that they can, as a rule, have no dislike 
to it beyond such a feeling as public opinion will 
speedily overcome. 

Discussion of the institution of plural marriage in 
Salt Lake City is fruitless; all that can be done is to 
observe. In assaulting the Mormon citadel, you strike 
against the air. "Polygamy degrades the women," 
you begin. *' Morally or socially?" says the Mormon. 
''Socially." "Granted," is the reply, "and that is a 
most desirable consummation. By socially lowering, 
it morally raises the woman. It makes her a servant, 
but it makes her pure and good." 

It is always w^ell to remember that if we have one 
argument against polj'gamy which from our Gentile 
point of view is unanswerable, it is not necessarv that 
we should rack our brains for others. All our modern 
experience is favorable to ranking woman as man's 
equal ; polygamy assumes that she shall be his servant 
— loving, faithful, cheerful, willing, but still a servant. 

The opposite poles upon the women question are 
Utah polygamy and Kansas female suffrage. 



WESTERN EDITOBS. 131 



CHAPTER XVI. 



WESTERN EDITORS. 



The attack upon Mormondom has been system- 
atized, and is conducted with military skill, by trench 
and parallel. The New England papers having called 
for *'facts" whereon to base their homilies. General 
Connor, of Fenian fame, set up the Union Vedette in 
Salt Lake City, and publishes on Saturdays a sheet 
expressly intended for Eastern reading. The mantle 
of the Sangamo Journal has fallen on the Vedette, and 
John C. Bennett is effaced by Connor. From this 
source it is that come the whole of the paragraphs 
against Brigham and all Moniiondom which fill the 
Eastern papers, and find their way to London. The 
editor has to fill his paper with peppery leaders, well- 
spiced telegrams, stinging ^' facts." Every week there 
must be something that can be used and quoted against 
Erigham. The Eastern remarks upon quotations in 
turn are quoted at Salt Lake. Under such circum- 
stances, even telegrams can be made to take a flavor. 
In to-day's Vedette we have one from St. Joseph, de- 
scribing how above one thousand **of these dirty, 
filthy dupes of the Great Salt Lake iniquity" are now 
squatting round the packet depot, awaiting transport. 
Another from Chicago tells us that the seven thousand 
European Mormons who have this year passed up the 
Missouri River "are of the lowest and most ignorant 
classes." The leader is directed against Mormons in 
general, and Stenhouse in particular, as editor of one of 



132 GREATER BRITAIN. 

the Mormon papers, and ex-postmaster of the Territory. 
lie has already had cause to fear the Vedette^ as it was 
throuojh the exertions of its editor that he lost his 
office. This matter is referred to in the leader of to- 
day : "When we found our letters scattered about the 
streets in fragments, we succeeded in getting an honest 
postmaster appointed in place of the editor of the Tele- 
graph — an organ where even carrots, pumpkins, and 
potatoes are current funds — directed by a clique of 
foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language, 
and who never drew a loyal breath since they came to 
Utah.'' The Mormon tax frauds, and the Mormon 
police, likewise come in for their share of abuse, and 
the writer concludes with a pathetic plea against arrest 
''for quietly indulging in a glass of wine in a private 
room with a friend.'' 

Attacks such as these make one understand the 
suspiciousness of the Mormon leaders, and the slow- 
ness of Stenhouse and his friends to take a joke if it 
concerns the church. Poor Artemus Ward once wrote 
to Stenhouse, "If you can't take a joke, you'll be 
darned, and you oughter ;" but the jest at which he 
can laugh has wrought no cure. Heber Kimball said 

to me one day; "They're all alike. There was 

eame here to write a book, and we thought better of 
him than of most. I showed him more kindness than 
I ever showed a man before or since, and then he 
called me a 'hoary reprobate.' I would advise him 
not to pass this way next time." 

The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday 
morning, at the tabernacle, I remarked that the 
Prophet's daughter, ^ina, had on the same dress as 
she had worn tbo evening before at the theater, in 
playing " Mpa. Musket" in the farce of '^ My Husband's 
Ghost,'- It was a black silk gown, with a Vandyke 



WESTERN EDITORS. 133 

flounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed 
it out in joke to a Mormon friend, when he denied my 
assertion in the most emphatic way, although he could 
not have known for certain that I was wrong, as he 
sat next to me in the theater during the whole play. 

The Mormons will talk freely of their own sus- 
piciousness. They say that the coldness with which 
travelers are usually received at Salt Lake Cit^' is 
the consequence of years of total misrepresentation. 
They forget that they are arguing in a circle, and that 
this misrepresentation is itself sometimes the result of 
their reserve. 

The news and advertisements are even more 
amusing than the leaders in the Vedette. A paragraph 
tells us, for instance, that "Mrs. Martha Stewart and 
Mrs. Robertson, of San Antonio, lately had an im- 
promptu light with revolvers; Mrs. Stewart was badly 
winged." Nor is this the only reference in the paper 
to shooting by ladies, as another paragraph tells us 
how a young girl, frightened by a sham ghost, drew 
on the would-be apparition, and with six barrels shot 
him twice through the head, and four times "in the 
regron of the heart." A quotation from the Owyhee 
Avalanche, speaking of gambling hells, tells us that 
"one hurdy shebang" in Silver City shipped 8000 
dollars as the net proceeds of its July business. " These 
leeches corral more clear cash than most quartz mills," 
remonstrates the editor. "Corral" is the Mexican 
cattle inclosure; the yard where the team mules are 
ranched; the kraal of Cape Colony, which, on the 
plains and the plateau, serves as a fort for men as well 
as a fold for oxen, and resembles the sermof the East. 
The word "to corral" means to shut into one of these 
pens; and thence "to pouch," "to pocket," "to bag," 
to get well into hand. 

12 



134 GREATER BRITAIN, 

The advertisements are in keeping with the news. 
"Everything, from a salamander safe to a Limerick 
jSsh-hook," is offered by one firm. "Fifty-three and 
a half and three and three-quarter thimble-skein 
Sch littler wagons," is offered by another. An ad- 
vertiser bids us "Spike the Guns of Humbug! and 
Beware of Deleterious Dyes ! Refuse to have your 
Heads Baptized with Liquid Fire!" Another says, 
"If you want a paper free from entanglements of 
cliques, and antagonistic to the corrupting evils of 
factionism, subscribe to the Montana Hadiator." No- 
thing beats the following: "Butcher's dead shot for 
bed-bugs! Curls them up as fire does a leaf ! Try 
it, and sleep in peace ! Sold by all live druggists." 

If we turn to the other Salt Lake papers, the Tele- 
graph, an independent Mormon paper, and the Deseret 
News, the oflicial journal of the church, we find a con- 
trast to the trash of the Vedette, Brigham's paper, 
clearly printed and of a pleasant size, is filled with the 
best and latest news from the outljung portions of the 
Territory, and from Europe. The motto on its head is 
a simple one — " Truth and Liberty;" and twenty-eight 
columns of solid news are given us. Among the items 
is an account of a fight upon the Smoky Hill route, 
which occurred on the day we reached this city, and in 
which two teamsters — George Hill and Luke West — 
were killed by the Kiowas and Gheyennes. A loj-al 
Union article from the pen of Albert Carrington, the 
editor, is followed by one upon the natural advantages 
of Utah, in which the writer complains that the very 
men who ridiculed the Mormons for settling in a desert 
are now declaiming against their being allowed to squat 
upon one of the "most fertile locations in the United 
States." The paper asserts that Mormon success is 
secured only by Mormon industrj'^, and that as a merely 



WESTERN EDI TOES. 135 

commercial speculation, apart from the religions im- 
pulse, the cultivation of Utah would not pay: *' Utah 
is no place for the loafer or the laz}^ man." An official 
report, like the Court Circular of England, is headed, 
*' President Brighara Young's trip JSTorth," and is 
signed by G. D. Watt, *' Reporter" to the church. 
The Old Testament is not spared. " From what "we 
saw of the timbered mountains," writes one reporter, 
"we had no despondency of Israel ever failing for 
material to build up, beautify, and adorn pleasant hab- 
itations in that part of Zion." A theatrical criticism is 
not wanting, and the church actors come in for "praise 
all round." In another part of the paper are telegraphic 
reports from the captains of the seven immigrant trains 
not yet come in, giving their position, and details of 
the number of days' march for which they have pro- 
visions still in hand. One reports "thirty-eight head 
of cattle stolen ;" another, "a good deal of mountain 
fever;" brt, on the whole, the telegrams look well. 
The edito**, speaking of the two English visitors now 
in the ci^y, says: "We greet them to our mountain 
habitation, and bid them welcome to our orchard ; and 
that's c<^nsiderable for an editor, especially if he has 
plural responsibilities to look after." Bishop Harring- 
ton reports from American Fork that everybody is 
thriving there, and " doing as the Mormon creed 
directs — minding their own business." ^' That's good, 
bishop," says the editor. The "Passenger List of 
the 2d Ox-train, Captain J D. Holladay," is given at 
length ; abont half the immigrants come with wife and 
family, very many w^ith live or six children. From 
Liverpool, the chief office for Europe, comes a gazette 
of "Releases and Appointments," signed "Brigham 
Young, Jun., President of the Church of Jesus Christ 
of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles and Adjacent 



136 GREATER BRITAIN, 

Countries/' accompanied by a dispatch, in wliich the 
'^President for England" gives details of his visits to 
the Saints in Norway, and of his conversations v^ith 
the United States minister at St. Petersburg. 

The Tdegra][>h^ like its editor, is practical, and does 
not deal in extract. All the sheet, with the exception 
of a few columns, is taken up with business advertise- 
ments ; but these are not the least amusing part of the 
paper. A gigantic figure of a man in high boots and 
felt hat, standing on a ladder and pasting up Messrs. 
Eldredge and Clawson's dry-goods advertisement, occu- 
pies nearly half the back page. Mr. Birch informs 
*' parties hauling wheat from San Pete County" that 
his mill at Fort Birch "is now running, and is pro- 
tected by a stone-wall fortification, and is situate at the 
mouth of Salt Canyon, just above Nephi City, Juab 
County, on the direct road to Pahranagat." A view of 
the fort, with posterns, parapets, embrasures, and a 
giant fiag, heads the advertisement. The cuts are not 
alwaj^s so cheerful : one far-western paper fills three- 
quarters of its front page with an engraving of a coffin. 
The editorial columns contain calls to the " brethren 
with teams " to aid the immigrants, an account of a 
"rather mixed case" of "double divorce" (Gentile), 
and of a prosecution of a man "for violation of the 
seventh commandment." A Mormon police report is 
headed, "One drunk at the calaboose." Defending 
himself against charges of "directing bishops" and 
" steadying the ark," the editor calls on the bishops 
to shorten their sermons: "we may get a crack for 
this, but we can't help it ; we like variety, life, and 
short meetings." In a paragraph about his visitors, 
our friend, the editor of the Telegrajph^ said, a day or 
tw^o after our arrival in the city: "If a stranger can 
escape the strychnine clique for three days after arri- 



WESTERN EDITORS. 1^7 

val, lie is forever afterward safe. Generally the first 
twenty-four hours are suiiicient to prostrate even the 
very robust." In a few words of regret at a change 
in the Denver newspaper statf, our editor says : '' How- 
ever, a couple of sentences indicate that George has 
no intention of abandoning the tripod. That's right: 
keep at it, my boy; misery likes company." 

The day after we reached Denver, the Gazette, com- 
menting on this same '' George," said: " Captain West 
has left the Rocky Mountains Neivs office. We are not 
surprised, as we could never see how any respectable, 
decent gentleman like George could get along with 
Governor Evans's paid hireling and whelp who edits 
that delectable sheet." Of the two papers -which exist 
in every town in the Union, each is always at work at- 
tempting to "use up" the other. I have seen the Dem- 
ocratic print of Chicago call its Republican opponent 
*' a radical, disunion, disreputable, bankrupt, emascu- 
lated evening newspaper concern of this city" — a 
string of terms by the side of which even Western 
utterances pale. 

A paragraph headed '' The Millennium" tells us that 
the editors of the Telegraph and Deseret News were seen 
yesterday afternoon walking together toward the Twen- 
tieth Ward. Another paragraph records the ill suc- 
cess of an expedition against Indians who had been 
*' raiding" down in " Dixie," or South Utah. A general 
order, signed "Lieut.-General Daniel H. Wells," and 
dated "headquarters Nauvoo Legion," directs the as- 
sembly, for a three days' "big drill," of the forces of 
the various military districts of the Territory. The 
name of "Territorial Militia," under which alone the 
United States can permit the existence of the legion, 
is carefully omitted. This is not the only warlike ad- 
vertisement in the paper: fourteen cases of Ballard 

12* 



138 GREATER BRITAIN. 

rifles are offered in exchange for cattle; and other 
firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends. Amuse- 
ments are not forgotten: a cricket match between two 
Mormon settlements in Cache County is recorded : 
"Wellsville whipping Brigham City with six wickets 
to go down ;" and is followed by an article in which 
the First President may have had a hand, pointing out 
that the Salt Lake Theater is going to be the greatest 
of theaters, and that the favor of its audience is a pass- 
port beyond Wallack's, and equal to Drury Lane or the 
Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of pres- 
ent prosperity, the First Presidency announce the an- 
nual gathering of the surviving members of Zion's 
camp, the association of the lirst immigrant band. 

There is about the Mormon papers much that tells 
of long settlement and prosperity. When I showed 
Btenhouse t]iQ Denver Gazette of our second day in that 
town, he said; "Well, I'elegraph's better than that!" 
The Denver sheet is a literary curiosity of the lirst 
order. Printed on chocolate-colored paper, in ink of 
a not much darker hue, it is in parts illegible — to the 
reader's regret, for what we w^ere able to make out 
was good enough to make us wish for more. 

The difference between the Mormon and Gentile 
papers is stronglj^ marked in the advertisements. The 
Denver Gazette is tilled with puffs of quacks and 
whisky shops. In the column headed " Business 
Cards,'' Dr. Ermerins announces that he may be con- 
sulted by his patients in the "French, German, and 
Eno-lish" tonsrues. Lower down we have the card of 
"Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon," which 
is preceded by an advertisement of "sulkies made to 
order," and followed by a leaded heading, "Know thy 
Destiny ; Madame Thornton, the English Astrologist 
and Psychometrician, has located herself at Hudson, 



WESTERN EDITORS. 139 

l^ew York ; by the aid of an instrument of intense 
power, known as the Psychomotrope, she guarantees 
to produce a lifelike picture of the future husband or 
wife of the applicant." There is a strange turning to- 
ward the supernatural among this people, j^strology 
is openly professed as a science throughout the United 
States; the success of spiritualism is amazing. The 
most sensible men are not exempt from the weakness: 
the dupes of the astrologers are not the uneducated 
Irish; they are the strong-minded, half-educated West- 
ern men, shrewd and keen in trade, brave in war, ma- 
terial and cold in faith, it would be supposed, but cred- 
ulous to folly, as we know, when personal revelation, 
the supernaturalism of the present day, is set before 
them in the crudest and least attractive forms. A little 
lower, " Charley Eyser" and " Gus Fogus" advertise 
their bars. The latter announces " Lager Beer at only 
10 cents," in a ^' cool retreat," "fitted up with green- 
growing trees." A returned warrior heads his an- 
nouncement, in huge capitals, "Back Home Again, 
An Old Hand at the Bellows, the Soldier Blacksmith : 
— S. M. Logan." In a country where weights and 
measures are rather a matter of practice than of law, 
Mr. O'Connell does well to add to "Lager beer 15 
cents," "Glasses hold Two Bushels." John Morris, 
of the "Little Giant" or " Theater Saloon," asks us to 
''call and see him ;" while his rivals of the "Progres- 
sive Saloon" offer the " finest liquors that the East can 
command." Morris Sigi, whose " lager is pronounced 
A ISTo. 1 by all who have used it," bids us " give him a 
fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false reports in 
circulation." Daniel Marsh, dealer in "breech-loading 
guns and revolvers," adds, " and anything that may be 
wanted, from a cradle to a coffin, both inclusive, made 
to order. An Indian Lodge on view, for sale." This 



140 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

18 the man at whose shop scalps hang for sale ; but he 
fails to name it in his advertisement; the Utes brought 
them in too late for insertion, perhaps. 

Advertisements of freight-trains now starting to the 
East, of mail-coaches to Buckskin Joe — advertisements 
slanting, topsy-turvy, and sideways turned — complete 
the outer sheet ; but some of them, through bad ink, 
printer's errors, strange English, and wilder Latin, are 
wholly unintelligible. It is hard to make much of this, 
for instance: "Mr. ^^Esculapius, no offense, I hope, as 
this is written extempore and ipso facto. But, per- 
haps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce omnes." 

In an editorial on the English visitors then in Den- 
ver, the chance of putting into their mouths a puff of 
the Territory of Colorado was not lost. We were made 
to *' appreciate the native energy and wealth of industry 
necessary in building up such a Star of Empire as Col- 
orado." The next paragraph is communicated from 
Conejos, in the south of the Territory, and says: " The 
election has now passed off, and I am confident that 
we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two 
in the game, for rascality in voting." Another leader 
calls on the people of Denver to remember that there 
are two men in the calaboose for mule stealing, and 
that the last man locked up for the offense was allowed 
to escape: somecottonwood-trees still exist, it believes. 
In former times, there was for the lynching here hinted 
at a reason which no longer exists: a man shut up in 
jail built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could scratch 
his way through the crumbling wail in two days, so 
the citizens generally hanged him in one. Now that 
the jails are in brick and stone, the job might safely 
be left to the sheriff; but the people of Denver seem to 
trust themselves better even than they do their dele- 
gate, Bob Wilson. 



WESTERN EDITORS. 141 

A year or two ago, the jails were so crazy that Col- 
oraclan criminals, when given tlieir choice "whether they 
would be hanged in a week, or "as soon after breakfast 
to-morrow as shall be convenient to the sheriff and 
agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, to you," as the Texan formula 
runs, used to elect for the quick delivery, on the ground 
that otherwise they would catch their deaths of cold — 
at least so the Denver story runs. They have, how- 
ever, a method of getting the jails inspected here which 
might be found useful at home; it consists in the simple 
phin of giving the governor of a jail an opportunity of 
seeing the practical working of the system by locking 
him up inside for awhile. 

These far- western papers are written or compiled 
under difficulties almost overwhelmins:. Mr. Fred- 
erick J. Stanton, at Denver, told me that often he had 
been forced to ''set up" and print as well as "edit" 
the paper wdiich he owns. Type is not always to be 
found. In its early days, the Alia Calif ornian once ap- 
peared with a paragraph which ran: "I have no YV in 
my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. I 
have sent to the Sandwich Islands for this letter; in 
the mean time we must use two Vs." 

Till I had seen the editors' rooms in Denver, Austin, 
and Salt Lake City, I had no conception of the point 
to which discomfort could be carried. For all these 
hardships, payment is small and slow. It consists 
often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the 
editor's vanity to be "liquored" by the best man of 
the place, treated to an occasional chat with the gov- 
ernor of the Territory, to a chair in the overland mail 
office whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel 
proprietor whenever he comes near the bar, and to a 
pistol-shot once or twice in a month. 

It must not be supposed that the Vedette does the 



142 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Mormons no harm; the perpetual reiteration in the 
Eastern and English papers of three sets of stories 
alone would suffice to break down a flourishing power. 
The three lines that are invariably taken as founda- 
tions for their stories are these — that the Mormon 
worsen are wretched, and would fain get away, but 
are checked by the Danites; that the Mormons are 
ready to fight with the Federal troops with the hope 
of success; that robbery of the people by the apostles 
and elders is at the bottom of Mormonism — or, as the 
Vedette puts it, '^on tithing and loaning hang all the 
law and the profits." 

If the mere fact of the existence of the Vedette ef- 
fectually refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites 
in these modern days, and therefore disposes of the 
first set of stories, the third is equally answered by a 
glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of 
advertisements, testify to the foundation by industry, 
in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agri- 
cultural community which California herself cannot 
match. The Mormons may well call their country 
"Deseret" — "land of the bee." The process of 
fertilization goes on day by day. Six or seven years 
ago. Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt Bush 
Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was 
carried out under episcopal direction, and the result 
is the growth of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton- 
mills and vineyards are springing up on every side, 
and '^ Dixie" begins to look down on its parent, the 
Salt Lake Valley. Irrigation from the mountain rills 
has done this miracle, we say, though the Saints un- 
doubtedly believe that God's hand is in it, helping 
miraculously " His peculiar people." 

In fiice of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice 
that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system, 



WESTERN EDITORS. 143 

tlioao^li Bri£!:hani knows nothinst of Wakefield. Town 
population and country population grew up side by 
side in every valley, and the plow was not allowed 
to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle. 

It is not only in water and verdure that ITtali is 
naturally poor. On the mining- map of the States, 
the countries that lie around Utah — Kevada, Arizona, 
Colorado, Montana — are one blaze of yellow, and blue, 
and red, colored from end to end with the tints that 
are used to denote the existence of precious metals. 
Utah is blank at present — blank, the Mormons say, 
by nature ; Gentiles say, merely through the absence 
of surve}^ ; and they do their best to circumvent 
mother nature. Every fall the '^strychnine" party 
raise the cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the hope 
of bringing a rush of miners down to Salt Lake City, 
too late for them to get away again before the snows 
begin. The presence of some thousands of broad- 
brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City, for a winter, 
would be the death of Mormonism, they believe. 
"Within the last few days, I am told that prospecting 
parties have found "pay dirt" in City Canyon, which, 
however, they had first themselves carefully "salted" 
with gold dust. There is coal at the settlement at 
which we breakfasted on our way from Weber River 
to Salt Lake; and Stenhouse tells us that the only 
difference between the Utah coal and that of Wales 
is, that the latter will burn, and the former won't! 

Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that 
whatever value the soil now possesses, represents only 
the loving labor bestowed upon it by the Saints, it 
is doubtful whether they are to continue to possess 
it, even though the remaining string of Vedetie-hovn 
stories assert that B righ am " threatens hell" to tho 
Gentiles who would expel him. 



144 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of the 
Vedette has done some harm to liberty of thought 
throughout the world. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

UTAH. 

" Whe^'^ you are driven hence, where shall you go?" 
''We take no thought for the morrow; the Lord 
will guide his people," was my rebuke from Elder 
Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing 
manner characteristic of the Saints. " You say mira- 
cles are passed and gone," he went on ; "but if God 
has ever interfered to protect a church, he has inter- 
posed on our behalf. In 1857, when the whole army 
of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S. 
Johnson, we were given strength to turn them aside, 
and defeat them without a blow. The Lord permitted 
us to dictate our own terms of peace. Again, when 
the locusts came in such swarms as to blacken the 
whole valley, and fill the air with a living fog, God 
sent millions of strange new gulls, and these devoured 
the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The Lord 
will guide his people." 

Often as I discussed the future of Utah and the 
church with Mormons, I could never get from them 
any answer but this; they would never even express 
a belief, as will many "Western Gentiles, that no at- 
tempt will be made to expel them from the country 
they now hold. They cannot help seeing how imme- 



UTAH. 145 

diate is the danger: from the American press there 
comes a crj, " Let us have this polygamy put down ; 
its existence is a disgrace to England from which it 
springs, a shame to America in which it dwells, to the 
Federal government whose laws it outrages and defies. 
How long wall you continue to tolerate this retrogres- 
sion from Christianity, this insult to civilization?" 

With the IlTew Englanders, the question is political 
as well as theological, personal as well as political — 
political, mainly because there is a great likeness be- 
tween Mormon expressions of belief in the divine origin 
of polygamy and the Southern answers to the Aboli- 
tionists: "Abraham was a slaveowner, and father of 
the faithful;" "David, the best-loved of God, was 
a polygamist" — " show us a biblical prohibition of 
slavery ;" *' show us a denunciation of polygamy, and 
we'll believe you." It is this similarity of the defensive 
positions of Mormonism and slavery which has led to 
the present peril of the Salt Lake Church : the New 
Englanders look on the Mormons, not only as heretics, 
but as friends to the slaveowners ; on the other hand, 
if you hear a man warmly praise the Mormons, you 
may set him down as a Southerner, or at the least a 
Democrat. 

Another reason for the hostility of jN'ew England is, 
that while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon 
America, the American people have but little share in 
its existence : a few of the leaders are New Englanders 
and New Yorkers, but of the rank and file, not one, 
Li every ten immigrants, the missionaries count upon 
finding that four come from England, two from Wales, 
one from the Scotch Lowlands, one from Sweden, one 
from Switzerland, and one from Prussia: from Catholic 
countries, none ; from all America, none. It is through 
this purely Igcal and_ temporary association of. ideas 

13 



146 GREATER BRITAIN. 

that we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant, 
large-hearted churchmen eager to march their armies 
against a church. 

If we put aside for a moment the question of the 
moral right to crush Mormonism in the name of truth, 
we find that it is, at all events, easy enough to do it. 
There is no difiiculty in finding legal excuses for action 
— no danger in backing Federal legislation with mili- 
tary force. The legal point is clear enough — clear 
upon a double issue. Congress can legislate for the 
Territories in social matters — has, in fact, already done 
80. Polygamy is at this moment punishable in Utah, 
but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad, 
not enforced. Without extraordinary action, its en- 
forcement would be impossible, for Mormon juiies will 
give no verdict antagonistic to their church ; but it is 
not only in this matter that the Mormons have been 
ofienders. They have sinned also against the land 
laws of America. The church, Brigham, Kimball, all 
are landholders on a scale not contemplated by the 
"Homestead" laws — unless to be forbidden; doubly, 
therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal 
Congress. There is a loophole open in the matter of 
polygamy — that adopted by the New York Commu- 
nists wlien they chose each a woman to be his legal 
wife, and so put themselves without the reach of law. 
This method of escape, I have been assured by Mormon 
elders, is one that nothing could force them to adopt. 
Rather than indirectly destroy their church by any 
such weak compliance, they would again renounce 
their homes, and make their painful way across the 
wilderness to some new Deseret. 

It is not likely that ITew England interference will 
hinge upon plurality. A " difiiculty '' can easily be 
made to arise upon the land question, and no breach 



UTAH. 147 

of the principle of toleration will, on the surface at 
least, be visible. J^o surveys have been held in the 
Territory since 1857, no lands within the territorial 
limits have been sold by the Federal land office. E^ot 
only have the limitations of the ** Homestead" and 
"Pre-emption" laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake 
City, with its palace, its theater, and hotels, is built 
upon the public lands of the United States. On the 
other hand, Mexican titles are respected in Arizona 
and l^ew Mexico; and as Utah was Mexican soil when, 
before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons 
settled on its wastes, it seems hard that their claims 
should not be equally respected. 

After all, the theory of Spanish authority was a 
ridiculous fiction. The Mormons were the first occu- 
pants of the country which now forms the Territories 
of Utah and Colorado and the State of Nevada, and 
were thus annexed to the United States without being 
in the least degree consulted. It is true that they 
might be said to have occupied the country as Amer- 
ican citizens, and so to have carried American sov- 
ereignty with them into the wilderness; but this, 
again, is a European, not an American theory. Amer- 
ican citizens are such, not as men born upon a certain 
soil, but as being citizens of a State of the Union, or 
an organized Territory ; and though the Mormons may 
be said to have accepted their position as citizens of 
the Territory of Utah, still they did so on the under- 
standing that it should continue a Mormon country, 
where Gentiles should at the most be barely tol- 
erated. 

We need not go further into the mazes of public 
law, or of ex post facto American enactments. The 
Mormons themselves admit that the letter of the law 
is against them ; bTit say that while it is claimed that 



148 GREATER BRITAIN 

Bostou and Philadelphia may fitly legislate for the 
Mormons three thousand miles away, because Utah is 
a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is Boston 
and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to remain 
a Territory, although they admitted the less populous 
Nebraska, ISTcvada, and Oregon to their rights as 
States. 

If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation, 
there can be no doubt upon the points of law^, there 
can be as little upon the military question. Of the 
fifteen hundred miles of waterless tract or desert that 
we crossed, seven hundred have been annihilated, and 
1869 may see the railroad track in the streets of Salt 
Lake City. This not only settles the military ques- 
tion, but is meant to do so. When men lay four miles 
of railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for' 
a whole year, when a government bribes high enough 
to secure so startling a rate of progress, there is some- 
thing more than commerce or settlement in the wind. 
The Pacific Railroad is not merely meant to be the 
shortest line from New York to San Francisco; it is. 
meant to put down Mormonism. 

If the Federal government decides to attack these i 
peaceable citizens of a Territory that should long since i 
have been a State, they certainly will not fight, and 
they no less surely will not disperse. Polynesia or' 
Mexico is their goal, and in the Marquesas or in Sonorai 
they may, perhaps, for a few years at least, be let alone, 
again to prove the forerunners of English civilization 
— planters of Saxon institutions and the English 
tongue; once more to perform their mission, as they 
performed it in Missouri and in Utah. 

When we turn from the simple legal question, and 
the still more simple military one, to the moral point 
involved in the forcible suppression of plural marriage 



UTAH, 149 

in one State by the might of all the others, we find 
the consideration of the matter confused by the appar- 
ent analogy between the so-called crusade against 
slavery and the proposed crusade against polygamy. 
There is no real resemblance between the cases. In 
the strictest sense there was no more a crusade against 
slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the 
part of a man who strikes one that bit him. The 
purest republicans have never pretended that the abo- 
lition of slavery was the justification of the war. The 
South rose in rebellion, and in rising gave New Eng- 
land an opportunity for the destruction in America of 
an institution at variance with the republican form of 
government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So far 
is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democ- 
racy, that it is impossible here, in Salt Lake City, not 
to see that it is the most leveling of all social institu- 
tions — Mormonism the most democratic of religions. 
A rich man in ISTew York leaves his two or three sons 
a large property, and founds a family ; a rich Mormon 
leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable frac- 
tion of his money, and each son must trudge out into 
the world, and toil for himself. Brigham's sons — 
those of them who are not gratuitously employed in 
hard service for the church in foreign parts — are cattle- 
drivers, small farmers, ranchmen. One of them was 
the only poorly-clad boy I saw in Salt Lake City. A 
system of polygamy, in which all the wives, and con- 
sequently all the children, are equal before the law, is 
a powerful engine of democracy. 

The general moral question of whether Mormonism 
is to be put down by the sword, because the Latter- 
day Saints differ in certain social customs from other 
Christians, is one for the preacher and the casuist, not 
for a traveling observer of English-speaking countries 

13* 



150 GREATER BRITAIN. 

as tlicj are. Mormonism comes under my observation 
as the rellsrious and social system of the most success- 
ful of all pioneers of English civilization. From this 
point of view it would be an immediate advantage to 
the world that thej should be driven out once more 
into the wilderness, again to found an England, in 
Mexico, in Polynesia, or on Eed River. It may be an 
immediate gain to civilization, but America herself 
was founded by schismatics upon a basis of tolerance 
to all ; and there are still to be found Americans who 
think it would be the severest blow that has been 
dealt to liberty since the St. Bartholomew, were she 
to lend her enormous power to systematic persecution 
at the cannon's mouth. 

The question of where to draw the line is one of 
interest. Great Britain draws it at black faces, and 
would hardly tolerate the existence among her white 
subjects in London of such a sect as that of the 
Maharajas of Bombay. "If you draw the line at 
black faces,'" say the Mormons, "why should you 
not let the Americans draw it at two thousand miles 
from Washington?" 

The moral question cannot be dissociated from 
Mormon history. The Saints marched from Missouri 
and Illinois, into no man's land, intending there to 
live out of the reach of those who differed from them, 
as do the Russian dissenters transpoi^ted in past ages 
to the provinces of Taurida and Kherson. It is by no 
fault of theirs, they say, that they are citizens of the 
United States. 

There is in the far West a fast increasing party who 
would leave people to be polygynists, polyandrists, 
Free-lovers, Shakers, or monogamists, as they please ; 
who would place the social relations as they have 
placed religion— out of the reach of the law. I need 



r 



UTAH, 151 

hardly say that public opinion has such overwhelming 
force in America that it is probable that even under a 
system of perfect toleration hy law, two forms of the 
family relation would never be found existing side by 
side. Polygamists would continue to migrate to Mor- 
mon land, Free-lovers to JSTew York, Shakers to Kew 
England. Some will find in this a reason for, and 
some a reason against, a change. In any case, a crusade 
against Mormonism will hardly draw sympathy from 
Is^ebraska, from Michigan, from Kansas. 

Many are found who say: "Leave Mormonism to 
itself, and it will die." The Pacific Railroad alone, 
they think, will kill it. Those Americans who know 
Utah best are not of this opinion. Mormonism is no 
superstition of the past. There is huge vitality in the 
polygamic church. Emerson once spoke to me of 
Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Mormonism as three 
religions which, right or wrong, are full of force. 
"The Mormons only need to be persecuted," said 
Elder Frederick to me, "to become as powerful as 
the Mohammedans." It is, indeed, more than doubtful 
whether polygamy can endure side by side with 
American monogamy — it is certain that Mormon 
priestly power and Mormon mysteries cannot in the 
long run withstand the presence of a large Gentile 
population; but, if Mormon titles to land are re- 
spected, and if great mineral wealth is not found 
to exist in Utah, Mormonism will not be exposed to 
any much larger Gentile intrusion than it has to cope 
with now. Settlers who can go to California or to 
Colorado ^' pares" will hardly fix themselves in the 
Utah desert. The Mexican table-lands will be annexed 
before Gentile immigrants seriously trouble Brigham. 
Gold and JSTew England are the most dreaded loes of 
Mormondom. Nothing can save polygamy if lodea 



152 GREATER BRITAIN. 

and placers such as those of all the surrounding States 
are found in Utah; nothing can save it if the New 
Englanders determine to put it down. 

Were Cono:ress to enforce the Homestead laws in 
Utah, and provide for the presence of an overwhelm- 
ing Gentile population, polygamy would not only 
die of itself, but drag Mormonism down in its fall. 
Brigham knows more completely than we can the 
necessity of isolation. He would not be likely to 
await the blow which increased Gentile immigration 
Would deal his power. 

If ISTew England decides to act, the table-lands of 
Mexico will see played once more the sad comedy of 
Utah. As:ain the Mormons will march into Mexican 
territory, again to wake some day, and find it Amer- 
ican. Theirs, however, will once more be the pride of 
having proved the pioneers of that English civilization 
which is destined to overspread the temperate world. 
The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexed Utah to the 
United States, but Brigham Young annexed it to 
Anglo-Saxondom. 



CHAPTER XYIIL 

NAMELESS ALPS. 



At the post-office, in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon 
a few last messages for home — he one to me for some 
Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and a wave, we 
parted, to meet in London after between us completing 



the circuit of the globe. 



This time aacain I was not alone: an Irish miner 



NAMELESS ALPS 153 

from Montana, with a bottle of whisky, a revolver and 
pick, shared the back-seat with the mail-bags. Before 
We had forded the Jordan, he had sung "The Wearing 
of the Green," and told me the day and the hour at 
which the republic was to be proclaimed at his native 
village in Galway. Like a true Irishman of the South 
or West, he was happy only when he could be gener 
ous ; and so much joy did he show when I discovered 
that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me 
dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline 
poison, that I half believed he had drawn it himself 
when we stopped to change horses for mules. Certain 
it is that he pressed his whisky so fast upon me and 
the various drivers, that the day we most needed its 
aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its 
career by serving as a target for a trial of breech- 
loading pistols. 

At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on 
the shores of the lake, and close to the foot of the 
mountains, we found Porter Rockwell, accredited chief 
of the Danites, the "Avenging Angels" of Utah, and 
leader, it is said, of the "White Indians" at the 
Mountain Meadows massacre. 

Since 1840 there has been no name of greater terror 
in the West than Rockwell's ; but in 1860 his death 
was reported in England, and the career of the great 
Brother of Gideon was ended, as we thought. I was 
told in Salt Lake City that he was still alive and well, 
and his portrait was among those that I got from Mr. 
Ottinger ; but I am not convinced that the man I saw, 
and whose picture I possess, was in fact the Porter 
Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may 
be convenient to have two or three men to pass by the 
one name ; and I suspect that this is so in the Rock- 
well case. 



154- GREATER BRITAIN. 

Under the name of Porter Rockwell some man (or 
men) has been the terror of the Mississippi \^alle3% of 
plains and plateau, for thirty years. In 1841, Joe 
Smith prophesied the death of Governor Boggs, of 
Missouri, within six months: within that time he was 
shot — rumor said by Rockwell. When the Danite was 
publicly charged with having done the deed for lifty 
dollars and a wagon-team, he swore he'd shoot any 
man who said he'd shot l^oggs for gain; " but if I am 
charged with shooting him, they'll have to prove it " — 
words that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died 
by the same hand, it is believed. Rockwell was known 
to be the working chief of the band organized in 1838 
to defend the First Presidencj^ by any means what- 
ever, fair or foul, known at various times as the "Big 
Fan" that should winnow the chatf from the wheat; 
the "Daughter of Zion," the " Destructives," the "Fly- 
ing Angels," the "Brother of Gideon," the "Destroy- 
ing Angels." "Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, 
for I will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs 
brass; and thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and 
I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their 
substance unto the lords of the w^hole earth" — this 
was the motto of the band. 

Little was heard of the Danites from the time that 
the Mormons were driven from Illinois and Missouri 
until 1852, when murder after murder, massacre after 
massacre, occurred in the Grand Plateau. Bands of 
immigrants, of settlers on their road to California, 
parties of United States officers, and escaping Mor- 
mons, w^ere attacked by "Indians," and found scalped 
by the next whites who came upon their trail. It 
was rumored in the Eastern States thac the red men 
were Mormons in disguise, following the tactics of 
the Anti-Renters of New York. In the case of Al- 




PORTER ROCKWELL.— P. 154. 



NAMELESS ALPS, 155 

nioii Babbitt, the ''Indians" were proved to have been 
whit«. 

Th^ atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows 
raassac.tx^ in 1857, when hundreds of men, women, and 
children were murdered by men armed and clothed as 
Indians, but sworn tcr by some who escaped as being 
whites. Porter Rockwell has had the infamy of this 
tremendoiio slaughter p^led on to the huge mass of his 
earlier deed» of blood— whether rightly or wrongly, 
who shall saj ] The matt that "I saw was the man that 
Captain Burti>:. saw in 1&60. His death was solemnly 
recorded in thb autumn of that year, yet of the identity 
of the person I iaw with the person described by Cap- 
tain Burton thv>A^ can be no question. The bald, 
frowning foreheau. the sinister smile, the long grizzly 
curls falling upon the back, the red cheek, the coal 
beard, the gra}^ eye, are not to be mistaken. Rock- 
well or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I had 
his photograph in ray pocket, and wanted to get him 
to sign it; but when, in awe of his glittering bowie 
and of his fame, I asked, by way of caution, the ranch- 
man — a new-come Paddy — whether Rockwell could 
write, the fellow told me with many an oath that "the 
boss" was as innocent of letters as a babe. "As for 
writin','' he said, "cuss me if he's on it. You bet he's 
not — you bet." 

i»J"ot far beyond Rockwell's, we drove close to the 
bench-land; and I was able to stop for a moment and 
examine the rocks. From the veranda of the Mor- 
mon poet Naisbitt's house in Salt Lake City, I had 
remarked a double line of terrace running on one 
even level round the whole of the great valley to the 
south, cut by nature along the base alike of the 
Oquirrh and the Wasatch. 

I had thought it possible that the terrace was the 



15i> G BEATER BRITAIN. 

result of the varying hardness of the strata; but, near 
Black Rock, on the overland track, I discovered that 
where the terrace lines have crossed the mountain 
precipices, they are continued merely by deep stains 
upon the rocks. The inference is that within ex- 
tremely recent, if not historic times, the water has 
stood at these levels from two to three hundred feet 
above the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4500 
feet above the sea. Three days' journey farther west, 
on the Reese's River Range, I detected similar stains. 
Was the whole basin of the Rocky Mountains — here 
more than a thousand miles across — once tilled with a 
huge sea, of which the two Sierras were the shores, 
and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi, Abbe, Hum- 
boldt, Washoe, and a hundred other ranges, the rocks 
and isles? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest of 
many such. I saw one on Mirage Plains that is Salter 
than its greater fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the 
bed of a smaller bitter lake; and there are salt pools 
in dozens scattered through Ruby and Smoky Valleys. 
The Great Salt Lake itself is sinking year by year, 
and the sage-brush is gaining upon the alkali desert 
throughout the Grand Plateau. All these signs point 
to the rapid dryiug-up of a great sea, owing to an 
alteration of climatic conditions. 

In the Odd Fellows' Library at San Francisco I 
found a map of North America, signed " John Harris, 
A.M.," and dated '"1605," which shows a great lake 
in the country now comprised in the Territories of 
Utah and Dakota. It has a width of fifteen degrees, 
and is named *'Thongo, or Thoya.'^ It is not likely 
that this inland sea is a mere exaggeration of the 
present Great Salt Lake, because the views of that 
sheet of water are everywhere limited by islands in 
such a way as to give to the eye the eflfect of exeeed- 



NAMELESS ALPS. 157 

ing narrowness. It is possible that the Jesuit Fathers, 
and other Spanish travelers from California, may have 
looked from the Utah mountains on the dwindling 
remnant of a great inland sea. 

On we jogged and jolted, till we lost sight of the 
American dead sea and of its lovely valley, and got 
into a canyon floored with huge boulders and slabs of 
roughened rock, where I expected each minute to un- 
dergo the fate of that Indian traveler who received 
such a jolt that he bit off the tip of his own tongue, or 
of Horace Greeley, whose head was bumped, it is said, 
through the roof of his conveyance. Here, as upon 
the eastern side of the Wasatch, the track was marked 
by never-ending lines of skeletons of mules and oxen. 

On the first evening from Salt Lake, we escaped 
once more from man at Stockton, a Gentile mining 
settlement in Rush Valley, too small to be called a 
village, though possessed of a municipality, and claim- 
ing the title of "city." By night we crossed by Rey- 
nolds' Pass the Parolom or Cedar Range, in a two- 
horse "jerky," to which we had been shifted for speed 
and safety. Upon the heights the frost was bitter ; 
and when we stopped at 3 a.m. for "supper," in which, 
breakfast was combined, we crawled into the stable 
like flies in autumn, half killed by the sudden chill. 
My miner spoke but once all night. "It's right cold," 
he said ; but fifty times at least he sang " The Wear- 
ing of the Green." It was his only tune. 

Soon after light, we passed the spot where Captain 
Gunnison of the Federal Engineers, who had been in 
1853 the first explorer of the Smoky Hill route, was 
killed "by the Ute Indians." Gunnison was an old 
enemy of the Mormons, and the spot is ominously near 
to Rockwell's home. Here we came out once more 
into the alkali, and our troubles from dust began. For 

U 



158 GREATER BRITAIN, 

hours we were in a desert white as snow; but for re- 
ward we gained a glorious view of the Goshoot Range, 
which we crossed by night, chmbing silently on foot 
for hours in the moonlight. The walking saved us 
from the cold. 

The third day — a Sunday morning — we were at the 
foot of the Waroja Mountains, with Egan Canyon for 
our pass, hewn by nature through the living rock. 
You dare swear you see the chisel-marks upon the 
stone. A gold-mill had years ago been erected here, 
and failed. The heavy machinery was lost upon the 
road ; but the four stone walls contained between them 
the wreck of the lighter '' plant." 

As we jolted and journeyed on across the succeeding 
plain, we spied in the far distance a group of black 
dots upon the alkali. Man seems very small in the in- 
finite expanse of the Grand Plateau — the roof, as it 
were, of the world. At the end of an hour we were 
upon them — a company of " overlanders" ^'tracking" 
across the continent with mules. First came two 
mounted men, well armed with Deringers in the belt, 
and Ballard breech-loaders on the thigh, prepared for 
ambush— ready for action against elk or red-skin. About 
fifty yards behind these scowling fellows came the main 
band of bearded, red-shirted diggers, in huge boots and 
felt hats, each man riding one mule, and driving another 
laden with packs and buckets. As we came up, the main 
body halted, and an interchange of compliments began. 
*' Say, mister, thet's a slim horse of yourn." " Guess 
not — guess he's all sorts of a horse, he air. And how 
far might it be to the State of Varmount?" ''Wall, 
guess the bo^^s down to hum will be kinder joyed to 
see us, howsomever that may be." Just at this mo- 
ment a rattlesnake was spied, and every revolver. dis- 
charged with a shout, all hailing the successful shot 



NAMELESS ALPS. 159 

with a ^' Bully for you; thet hit him whar he lives. * 
And on, without more ado, they w^ent. 

Even the roughest of these overlanders has in him 
something more than roughness. As far as appearance 
goes, every woman of the far West is a duchess, each 
man a Coriolanus. The royal gait, the imperial glance 
and frown, belong to every ranchman in Nevada. 
Every fellow that you meet upon the track near Stock- 
ton or Austin Cit}^ walks as though he were detying 
lightning, yet this without silly strut or braggadocio. 
Nothing can be more complete than the ranchman's 
self-command, save in the one point of oaths; the 
strongest, freshest, however, of their moral features is 
a grand enthusiasm, amounting sometimes to insanity. 
As for their oaths, they tell you it is nothing unless 
the air is " blue with cusses." At one of the ranches 
where there was a woman, she said quietly to me, in 
the middle of an awful burst of swearing, " Guess Bill 
swears steep;" to which I replied, "Guess so" — the 
only allusion I ever heard or hazarded to Western 
swearing. 

Leaving to our north a snowy range — nameless 
here, but marked on European maps as the East 
Humboldt — we reached the foot of the Ruby Valley 
Mountains on the Sunday afternoon in glowing sun- 
shine, and crossed them in a snow-storm. In the 
night we journeyed up and down the Diamond or 
Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of 
the Pond Chain. At the ranch — where, in the ab- 
sence of elk, we ate "bacon," and dreamt we break- 
fasted — I chatted with an agent of the Mail Company 
on the position of the ranchmen, divisible, as he told 
me, into "cooks and hostlers." The cooks, my ex- 
perience had taught me, were the aptest scholars, the 
greatest politicians; the hostlers, men of war and 



160 GREATER BRITAIN, 

completest masters of the art of Western swearing. 
The cooks had a New England cut; the hostlers, like 
Southerners, wore their hair all down their backs. I 
begged an explanation of the reason for the marked 
distinction. " They are picked," he said, "from dif- 
ferent classes. When a boy comes to me and asks for 
something to do, I give him a look, and see what kind 
of stuff he's made of If he's a gay duck out for a 
six-weeks' spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter 
Wells; but if he's a clerk or a poet, or any such sorter 
fool as that, why then I set him cooking; and plaguy 
good cooks they make, as you must tind." 

The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd 
fellows as are the ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots, 
flannel shirts tucked into their trowsers, but no coat or 
vest, and hats with enormous brims, they have their 
hair long, and their beards untrimmed. Their oaths, 
I need hardly say, are fearful. At night they wrap 
themselves in an enormous cloak, drink as much 
whisky as their passengers can spare them, crack 
their whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrel- 
some and overbearing, honest probablj-, but eccentric 
in their ways of showing it. They belong chiefly to 
the mixed Iiish and German race, and have all been 
in Australia during the gold rush, and in California 
before deep sinking replaced the surface diggings. 
They will tell you how they often washed out and 
gambled away a thousand ounces in a month, living 
like Roman emperors, then started in digging-life 
again upon the charity of their wealthier friends. 
They hate men dressed in *'biled shirts," or in "store 
clothes," and show their aversion in strange ways. I 
had no objection myself to build flres and fetch wood; 
but I drew the line at going into the sage-brush to 
catch the mules, that not being a business which I 



NAMELESS ALPS. 161 

felt competent to undertake. The season was ad- 
vp.nced, the snows had not yet reached the valleys, 
which were parched by the drought of all the sum- 
mer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they wandered 
a lone: wav. Time after time we would drive into a 
station, the driver saying, with strange oaths, "Guess 
them mules is clared out from this here ranch; guess 
they is ioto this sage-brush;" and it would be an hour 
before the mules would be discovered feeding in some 
forgotten valley. Meanwhile the miner and myself 
would have revolver practice at the skeletons and 
telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, and rattle- 
snakes grew scarce. 

After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of 
dress and manner displayed by Western men, but 
Eastern men and Europeans upon the plateau are not 
the prim creatures of Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From 
San Francisco I sent home an excellent photograph of 
myself in the clothes in which I had crossed the plateau, 
those being the only onfes I had to wear till my baggage 
came round from Panama. The result was, that my 
oldest friends failed to recognize the portrait. At the 
foot I had written " A Border Ruffian :" they believed 
not the likeness, but the legend. 

The difficulties of dress upon these mountain ranges 
are great indeed. To sit one night exposed to keen 
frost and biting wind, and the next day to toil for hours 
up a mountain-side, beneath a blazing sun, are very 
opposite conditions. I found my dress no bad one. 
At night I wore a Canadian fox-fur cap, Mormon 'coon- 
skin gloves, two coats, and the whole of my light silk 
shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves, and 
cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama 
hat to my "fit-out." 

As we began the ascent of the Pond River Range, 

14* 



162 GEEATER BRITAIN, 

we caught up a bullock-train, which there was not 
room to pass. The miner and mj^self turned out from 
the jerky, and for hours climbed alongside the wagons. 
I was struck by the freemasonry of this mountain 
travel : Bryant, the miner, had come to the end of his 
"solace," as the most famed chewing tobacco in these 
parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he 
asked for some, and was at once presented with a huge 
cake — enough, I should have thought, to have lasted 
a Channel pilot for ten years. 

The climb w^as long enough to give me deep insight 
into the inner mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of 
the great two-storied Californian wagons was drawn by 
twelve stout oxen ; still, the pace was not a mile an 
hour, accomplished, as it seemed to me, not so much 
by the aid as in spite of tremendous flogging. Each 
teamster carried a short-handled whip with a twelve- 
foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands, 
and, after many a whirl, brought down along the whole 
length of the back of each bullock of the team in turn, 
the stroke being accompanied by a shout of the bul- 
lock's name, and followed, as it was preceded, by a 
string of the most explosive oaths. The favorite 
names for bullocks were those of noted public charac- 
ters and of Mormon elders, and cries were frequent of 
^aio, Brigham !" "Ho, Joseph!" " Ho, Gr^nt!"— the 
blow falling with the accented syllable. The London 
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would 
find at Pond Kiver ranch an excellent opening for a 
mission. The appointed officer should be supplied 
with two Deringers and a well-filled whisky-barrel. 

Through a gap in the mountain crest we sighted the 
"West Humboldt Range, across an open country dotted 
here and there with stunted cedar, and, crossing Smoky 
Valley, we plunged into a deep pass in the Toi Abbe 



NAMELESS ALPS. 163 

Range, and reached Austin — a mining town of import- 
ance, rising two years old — in the afternoon of the 
fourth day from Salt Lake City. 

After dining at an Italian digger's restaurant with 
an amount of luxury that recalled our feasts at Salt 
Lake City, I started on a stroll, in which I was stopped 
at once by a shout from an open bar-room of "Say, 
mister !" Pulling up sharply, I was surrounded by an 
eager crowd, asking from all sides the one question : 
" Might you be Professor MuUer ?" Although liattered 
to iind that I looked less disreputable and ruffianly 
than I felt, I nevertheless explained as best I could 
that I was no professor — only to be assured that if I 
was any professor at ah, Muller or other, I should do 
just as well: a mule was ready for me to ride to the 
mine, and '' Jess kinder fix us up about this new lode " 
If my new-found friends had not carried an overwhelm- 
ing force of pistols, I might have gone to the mine 
as Professor Muller, and given my opinion for what it 
was worth : as it was, I escaped only by "liquoring 
np " over the error. Cases of mistaken identity are 
not always so pleasant in Austin. They told me that, 
a few weeks before, a man riding down the street 
heard a shot, saw his hat fall into the mud, and, pick- 
ing it up, found a small round hole on each side. Look- 
ing up, he saw a tall miner, revolver smoking in hand, 
who smiled grimly, and said: " Guess thet's my muel." 
Having politely explained when and where the mule 
was bought, the miner professed himself satisfied with 
a "Guess I was wrong — let's liquor." 

In. the course of my walk through Austin I came 
upon a row of neat huts, each with a board on which 
was painted, " Sam Sing, washing and ironing," or 
" Mangling by Ah Low." A few paces farther on was 
a shop painted red, but adorned with cabalistic scrawls 



104 GREATER BRITAIN. 

in black ink; and farther still was a tiny joss house. 
Yellow men, in spotless clothes of dark-green and 
blue, were busy at buying and selling, at cooking, at 
washing. Some, at a short trot, were carrying bur- 
dens at the end of a long bamboo pole. All were 
quiet, quick, orderly, and clean. I had at last come 
thoroughly among the Chinese people, not to lose sight 
of them again until I left Geelong, or even Suez. 

Returning to the room where I had dined, I parted 
with Pat Bryant, quitting him, in Western fashion, after 
a good *' trade " or "swop." He had taken a fancy to 
the bigger of ni}^ two revolvers. He was going to 
breed cattle in Oregon, he told me, and thought it 
might be useful for shooting his wildest beasts by 
riding in the Indian manner, side by side with them, 
and shooting at the heart. I answered by guessing 
that I "was on the sell;" and traded the weapon 
against one of his that matched my smaller tool. 
When I reached Virginia City, I inquired prices, and 
was almost disappointed to find that I had not been 
cheated in the "trade." 

A few minutes after leaving the " hotel " at Austin, 
and calling at the post-oltice for the mails, I again 
found myself in the desert — indeed, Austin itself can 
hardly be styled an oasis : it may have gold, but it has 
no green thing within its limits. It is in canyons and on 
plains like these, with the skeletons of oxen every few 
yards along the track, that one comes to comprehend 
the full significance of the terrible entry in the anny 
route-books — "Ko grass; no water." 

Descending a succession of tremendous "grades," 
as inclines upon roads and railro-ads are called out 
West, we came on to the lava-covered plain of Reese's 
River Valley, a wall of snowy mountain rising grandly 
in our front. Close to the stream were a ranch or two, 



NAMELESS ALPS. 165 

and a double camp, of miners and of a company of 
Federal troops. The diggers were playing with their 
glistening knives as diggers only can; the soldiers — 
their huge sombreros worn loosely on one side — were 
lounging idly in the sun. 

Within an hour, wew^ere again in snow and ice upon 
the summit of another nameless range. 

This evening, after live sleepless nights, I felt most 
terribly the peculiar form of fatigue that we had ex- 
perienced after six days and nights upon the plains. 
Again the brain seemed divided into two parts, think- 
ing independently, and one side putting questions 
wdiile the other answered them ; but this time there 
was also a sort of half insanity, a not altogether dis- 
agreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the 
actual by an imagined ideal scene. 

On and on we journeyed, avoiding the Shoshon<^ and 
West Humboldt Mountains, but picking our way along 
the most fearful ledges that it has been my finite to cross, 
and traversing from end to end the dreadful Mirage 
Plains. At nightfall we sighted Mount Davidson and 
the Washoe Range, and at 3 a.m. I was in bed once 
more — in Virginia City. 



166 GREATER BRITAIN, 



CHAPTER XIX. 



VIRGINIA CITY. 



" Guess the governor's consid'rable skeert." 

*'You bet, he's mad." 

My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table 
seemed to end the talk ; but I had not been out West 
for nothing, so explaining that I was only four hours 
in Virginia City, I inquired what had occurred to fill 
the governor of IlTevada with vexation and alarm. 

"D'you tell now! only four hours in this great 
young city. Wall, guess it's a bully business. You 
see, some time back the governor pardoned a road 
agent after the citizens had voted him a rope. Yes, 
sir! But that ain't all : yesterda}^, cuss me if he didn't 
refuse ter pardon one of the boj's who had jess shot 
another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself some 
pumpkins." I duly expressed my horror, and my 
informant went on : " Wall, guess the citizens paid 
him off purty slick. They jess sent him a short thick 
bit of rope with a label *For his Excellency.' You 
bet ef he ain't mad — ^you bet ! Pass us those molasses, 
mister." 

I was not disappointed : I had not come to JtTevada 
for nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since 
I first heard their fame in ISTew York, had been with 
me a passion, but the deed thus told me in the dining- 
room of the '' Empire" Hotel was worthy a place in the 
annals of "Washoe." Under its former name, the 
chief town of JJ^evada was ranked not only the highest, 



VIRGINIA CITY. 167 

but the "cussedest" town in the States, its citizens ex- 
pecting a " dead man for breakfast" every day, and its 
streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above 
the sea. Its twofold fame is leaving it: the Coloradan 
villages of E"orth Empire and Black Hawk are nine or 
ten thousand feet above sea level, and Austin, and 
Virginia City in Montana beat it in playful pistoling 
and vice. JS'evertheless, in the point of " pure cussed- 
ness" old Washoe still stands well, as my lirst intro- 
ducTion to its ways will show. All the talk of ISTevada 
reformation applies only to the surface signs: when a 
miner tells you that Washoe is turning pious, and that 
he intends shortly to "vamose," he means that, unlike 
Austin, which is still in its first state of mule-stealing 
and mont^, Virginia City has passed through the sec- 
ond period — that of ** vigilance committees" and "his- 
toric trees" — and is entering the third, the stage of 
churches and "city officers," or police. 

The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of 
the municipality tells us that the "permanent popula- 
tion" consists of those who reside more than a month 
within the city. At this moment the miners are pour- 
ing into Washoe from north and south and east, from 
Montana, from Arizona, and from Utah, coming to 
the gayeties of the largest mining city to spend their 
money during- the fierce short winter. When I saw 
Virginia City, it was worse than Austin. 

Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking- shop, 
a gaming-hell, or worse. With no one to make beds, 
to mend clothes, to cook food — with no house, no 
home — men are almost certain to drink and gamble. 
The Washoe bar-rooms are the most brilliant in the 
States : as we drove in from Austin at 3 a.m., there 
was blaze enough for us to see from the frozen street 
the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Heenan, 



168 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

and the other Californian celebrities with which the 
bar-rooms were adorned. 

Although "petticoats," even Chinese, are scarce, 
dancing was going on in every house; but there is a 
rule in miners' balls that prevents all difficulties arising 
fiom an over-supply of men : everyone who has a patch 
on the rear portion of his breeches does duty for a lady 
in the dance, and as gentlemen are forced by the cus- 
tom of the place to treat their partners at the bar, 
patches are popular. 

Up to eleven in the morning hardly a man was to be 
seen : a community that sits up all night, begins its 
work in the afternoon. For hours I had the blazing 
hills called streets to myself for meditating ground; 
but it did not need hours to bring me to think that a 
Verm outer's description of the climate of the mount- 
ains was not a bad one when he said: "You rise at 
eight, and shiver in your cloak till nine, when you lay 
it aside, and walk freely in your woolens. At twelve 
you come in for your gauze coat and your Panama ; at 
two you are in a hammock cursing the heat, but at 
four you venture out again, and by five are in your 
woolens. At six you begin to shake with cold, and 
shiver on till bedtime, which you make darned early." 
Even at thisgreatheight, the thermometer in the after- 
noon touches 80° Fahr. in the shade, wliile from sunset 
to sunrise there is a bitter frost. So it is throughout 
the plateau. When morning after morning we reached 
a ranch, and rushed out of the freezing ambulance 
through the still colder outer air to the fragrant cedar 
fire, there to roll with pain at the thawing of our joints, 
it was hard to bear it in mind that by eight o'clock we 
should be shutting out the sun, and by noon melting 
even in the deepest shade. 

As I eat at dinner in a miner's restaurant, my oppo- 



VIRGINIA CITY. 169 

» 
site neighbor, finding that I was not long from Eng- 
land, informed me he was "the independent editor of 
the Nevada Union Gazette.^'' and went on to ask: "And 
how might you have left literatooral pursoots ? How 
air Tennyson and Thomas T. Carlyle ?" I assured him 
that to the best of my belief they were fairly well, to 
which his reply was: " Guess them ther men ken sling 
ink, they ken." When we parted, he gave me a copy 
of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival 
editor "a walking whisky-bottle" and " a Fenian imp.'* 
The latter phrase reminded me that, of the two 'or 
three dozen American editors that I had met, this Kew 
Englander was the first who was " native born." Sten- 
house, in Salt Lake City, is an Englishman, so is Stan- 
ton, of Denver, and the whole of the remainder of the 
band were Irishmen. As for the earlier assertion in 
the "editorial," it was not a wild one, seeing that Vir- 
ginia City has five hundred whisky-shops for a popula- 
tion of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Vir- 
ginia City, in a farewell speech to the inhabitants that 
should have been published in his works: "I never, 
gentlemen, was in a city where I was treated so inell, 
nor, I will add, so often.'' Through every open door 
the diggers can be seen tossing the whisky down their 
throats with a scowl of resolve, as though they were 
committing suicide — which, indeed, except in the 
point of speed, is probably the case. 

The Union Gazette was not the only paper that I had 
given me to read that morning. ISTot a bridge over a 
" crick," not even a blacked pair of boots, made me so 
thoroughly aware that I had in a measure returned to 
civilization as did the gift of an Alfa Calif omian containi ng 
a report of a debate in the English Parliament upon the 
Bank Charter Act. The speeches were appropriate 
to my feelings; I had just returned not only to civili- 

15 



170 G BEATER B HI TAIN. 

zation, but to the European iiiconveuiences of gold and 
silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks circulate 
indifferently, with a double set of prices always marked 
and asked ; in !N"evada and California, greenbacks are 
as invisible as gold in New York or Kansas. Nothing 
can persuade the Californians that the adoption by the 
Eastern States of an inconvertible paper system is any- 
thing but the result of a conspiracy against the Pacific 
States — one in which they at least are determined to 
have no share. Strongly Unionist in feeling as were 
California, Oregon, and Nevada during the rebellion, 
to have forced greenbacks upon them would have been 
almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In 
the severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce; 
but paper money they believe to be downright robbery, 
and the invention of the devil. 

To me the reaching gold once more was far from 
pleasant, for the advantages of paper money to the 
traveler are enormous; it is light, it wears no holes in 
your pockets, it reveals its presence by no untimely 
clinking; when you jump from a coach, every thief 
within a mile is not at once aware that you have ten 
dollars in your right-hand pocket. The Nevadans say 
that forgeries are so common that their neighbors in 
Colorado have been forced to agree that an}' decent 
imitation shall be taken as good, it being too difficult 
to examine into each case. For my part, though in 
rapid travel a good deal of paper passed through my 
hands in change, my only loss by forgery was one half- 
dollar note ; my loss by wear and tear the same. 

In spite of the gold currency, prices are higher in 
Nevada than in Denver. A shave is half a dollar — 
gold ; in Washoe and in Atchison, but a paper quarter. 
A boot-blacking is fifty cents in gold, instead of ten 
cents paper, as in Chicago or St. Louis. 



V IB G INI A CITY. 171 

During the war, when fluctuations in the value of 
the paper were great and sudden, prices changed from 
day to day. Hotel proprietors in the West received 
their guests at breakfast, it is said, with ^' Glorious 

news; we've whipped at . Gold's 180; board's 

down half a dollar." While I was in the country, gold 
fluctuated between 140 and 163, but prices remained 
unaltered. 

Paper money is of some use to a young country in 
making the rate of wages appear enormous, and so at- 
tracting immigration. If a Cork bog-trotter is told 
that he can get two dollars a day for his work in Amer- 
ica, but only one in Canada, no economic considera- 
tions interfere to prevent him rushing to the nominally 
higher rate. Whether the workingmen of America 
have been gainers by the inflation of the currency, or 
the reverse, it is hard to say. It has been stated in the 
Senate that wages have risen sixty per cent., and prices 
ninety per cent; but " prices" is a term of great width. 
The men themselves believe that they have not been 
losers, and no argument can be so strong as that. 

My flrst afternoon upon Mount Davidson I spent 
underground in the Gould and Curry Mine, the 
wealthiest and largest of those that have tapped the 
famous Comstock Lode. In this single vein of silver 
lies the prosperity not only of the city, but of Nevada 
State ; its discovery will have hastened the completion 
of the overland railway itself by several years. It is 
owing to the enormous yield of this one lode that the 
United States now stands second only to Mexico as a 
silver-producing land. In one year Nevada has given 
the world as much silver as there came from the mines 
of all Peru. 

The rise of Nevada has been sudden. I was shown 
in Virginia City a building block of land that rents 



172 GREATER BRITAIN. 

for ten times what it cost four years ago. Nothing 
short of solid silver by the yard would have brought 
twenty thousand men to live upon the summit of 
Mount Davidson. It is easy here to understand the 
mad rush and madder speculation that took place at 
the time of the discovery. Every valley in the Washoe 
Eange was *' prospected," and pronounced paved with 
silver; every mountain was a solid mass. "Cities" 
were laid out, and town lots sold, wherever room was 
afforded by a flat piece of ground. The publication of 
the Californian newspapers was suspended, as writers, 
editors, proprietors, and devils, all had gone with the 
rush. San Francisco went clean mad, and London 
and Paris were not far behind. Of the hundred 
"cities" founded, but one was built; of the thousand 
claims registered, but a hundred were taken up and 
worked; of the companies formed, but half a dozen 
ever paid a dividend, except that obtained from the 
sale of their plant. The silver of which the whole 
base of Mount Davidson is composed has not been 
traced in the surrounding hills, though they are 
covered with a forest of posts, marking the limits of 
foro^otten "claims:" 

"James Thompson, 130 feet KE. by K" 
"Ezra Williams, 130 feet due E.;" 
and so for miles. The Gould and Curry Company, 
on the other hand, is said to have once paid a larger 
half-yearly dividend than the sum of the original 
capital, and its shares have been quoted at 1000 per 
cent. Such are the differences of a hundred yards. 

One of the oddities of mining life is, that the gold- 
dig«*ers profess a sublime contempt for silver-miners 
ancl their trade. A Coloradan going West was asked 
in Nevada if in his country they could beat the (Dora- 
stock lode. ^'Dear, no!" he said.' "The boys with 



VIRGINIA CITY. 173 

113 are plaguy discouraged jess at present." The 
IvTevadaiia were down upon the word. "Discouraged, 
air they!" " Why, yes I They've jess found they've 
got ter dig through three feet of solid silver 'fore ever 
they come ter gold." 

Some of the Nevada companies have curious titles. 
"The Union Lumber Association" is not bad; but 
*' The Segregated Belcher Mining Enterprise of Gold 
Hill District, Storey County, Nevada State," is far 
before it as an advertising name. 

In a real ''coach" at last — a coach with windows 
and a roof — drawn by six "mustangs," we dashed 
down Mount Davidson upon a real road, engineered 
with grades and bridges — m^^ first since Junction City. 
Through the Devil's Gate w^e burst out upon a chaotic 
country. For a hundred miles the eye ranged over 
humps and bumps of every size, from stones to mount- 
ains, but no level ground, no held, no house, no tree, 
no green. Not even the Sahara so thoroughly de- 
serves the name of "desert." In Egypt there is the 
oasis, in Arabia here and there a date and a sweet- 
water well ; here there is nothing, not even earth. 
The ground is soda, and the w^ater and air are full 
of salt. 

This road is notorious for the depredations of the 
"road agents," as white highwaymen are politely 
called, red or yellow robbers being still "darned 
thieves." At Desert Wells, the coach had been 
robbed, a week before I passed, by men who had 
first tied up the ranchmen, and taken their places to 
receive the driver and passengers when they arrived. 
The prime object with the robbers is the treasury box 
of "dust," but they generally "go through" the pas- 
sengers, by way of pastime, after their more regular 
work is done. As to firing, they have a rule — a 

15* 



174 GREATER BBITAIN. 

simple one. If a passenger shoots, every man is 
killed. It need not be said that the armed driver 
and armed guard never shoot; they know their busi- 
ness far too well. 

Close here we came on hot and cold springs in close 
conjunction, flowing almost from the same " shik-hole" 
— the original twofold springs, I hinted to our driver, 
that Poseidon planted in the Atlantic isle. He said 
that "some one of that name" had a ranch near C«or- 
son, so I ^'concluded" to drop Poseidon, lest I should 
say something that might offend. 

From Desert Wells the alkali grew worse and worse, 
but began to be alleviated at the ranches by irrigation 
of the throat with delicious Californian wine. The 
plain was strewn with erratic boulders, and hm^e and 
there 1 noticed sharp sand-cones, like those of the Elk 
Mountain country in Utah. 

At last we dashed into the "city" named after the 
notorious Kit Carson, of which an old inhabitant has 
lately said : " This here city is growing plaguy mean 
— there was only one man shot all yesterday. ' There 
was what is here styled an "altercation" a day or two 
ago. The sheriff tried to arrest a man in broad day- 
light in the single street which Carson boasts. The 
result w^as that each fired several shots at the other, 
and that both were badly hurt. . 

The half-deserted mining village and wholly ruined 
Mormon settlement stand grimly on the bare rock, 
surrounded by weird-looking depressions of the earth, 
the far-famed " sinks," the very bottom of the plateau, 
and goal of all the plateau streams — in summer dry, 
and spread with sheets of salt; in winter filled with 
brine. The Sierra Kevada rises like a wall from the 
salt pools, with a fringe of giant, leafless trees hanging 
stifily from its heights — my first forest since I left the 



VIBGINIA CITY. 175 

Missouri bottoms. The trees made me feel that I was 
really across the continent, within reach at least of the 
fogs of the Pacific — on "the other side;" that there 
was still rough, cold work to be done was clear from 
the great snow-fields that showed through the pines 
with that threatening blackness that the purest of 
snows wear in the evening when they face the east. 

As I gazed upon the tremendous battlements of the 
Sierra, I not only ceased to marvel that for three hun- 
dred years trafiic had gone round by Panama rather 
than through these frightful obstacles, but even won 
dered that they should be surmounted now. In this 
hideous valley it was that the Californian immigrants 
wintered in 1848, and killed their Indian guides for 
food. For three months more the strongest of them 
lived upon the bodies of those who died, incapable in 
their weakness of making good their foothold upon the 
slippery snows of the Sierra. After awhile, some 
were cannibals by choice ; but the story is not one that 
can be told. 

Galloping up the gentle grades of Johnson's Pass, we 
began the ascent of the last of fifteen great mountain 
rano^es crossed or flanked since I had left Great Salt 
Lake City. The thought recalled a passage of arms 
that had occurred at Denver between Dixon and Gov- 
ernor Gilpin. In his grand enthusiastic way, the gov- 
ernor, pointing to the Cordillera, said: ''Five hundred 
snowy ranges lie between this and San Francisco." 
"Peaks,'* said Dixon. "Ranges!" thundered Gilpin; 
I've seen thera." 

Of the fifteen greater ranges to the westward of Salt 
Lake, eight at least are named from the rivers they 
contain, or are wholly nameless. Trade has preceded 
survey; the country is not yet thoroughly explored. 
The six paper maps by which I traveled — the best and 



176 G BEATER BRITAIN. 

latest — diftered in essential points. The position and 
length of the Great Salt Lake itself are not yet accu- 
rately known; the height of Mount Hood has been 
made anything between nine thousand and twenty 
thousand feet; the southern boundary line of Nevada 
State passes through untrodden wilds. A rectiiication 
of the limits of California and Nevada was attempted 
no great time ago, and the head-waters of some stream 
which formed a starting-point had been found to be 
erroneously laid down. At the nourishing young city 
of Aurora, in Esmeralda County, a court of California 
was sitting. A mounted messenger rode up at great 
pace, and, throwing his bridle round the stump, dashed 
in breathlessly, shouting, " What's this here court?" 
Being told that it was a Californian court, he said, 
"Wall, thet's all wrong: this here's Nevada. We've 
been and rectified this boundary, an' Califoriya's a good 
ten mile olf here." *'Wall, Mr. Judge, I move this 
court adjourn," said the plaintiff's counsel. "How 
can a court adjourn thet's not a court?" replied the 
judge. "Guess I'll go." And off he went. So, if the 
court of Aurora loas a court, it must be sitting now. 

The coaching on this line is beyond comparison the 
best the world can show. Drawn by six half-bred 
mustangs, driven by whips of the fame of the Hank 
Monk "who drove Greeley," the mails and passengers 
have been conveyed from Virginia City to the rail at 
Placerville, 154 miles, in 15 hours and 20 minutes, in- 
cluding a stoppage of half an hour for supper, and six- 
teen shorter stays to oliange horses. In this distance, 
the Sierra Nevada has to be traversed in a rapid rise of 
three thousand feet, a fall of a thousand feet, another 
rise of the same, and then a descent of live thousand 
feet on the Californian side. 

Before the road was made, the passage was one of 



t> 
H 

M 
O 

f 

< 

W 

K| 

o 
»^ 

w 

tel 

{«► 
W 
o 

I 




VIRGINIA CITY. 177 

extraordinary difficulty. A wagon once started, they 
say, from Folsora, bearing *' Carson or bust" in large 
letters upon the tilt. After ten days, it returned lamely 
enough, with four of the twelve oxen gone, and bear- 
ing the label "Busted." 

When we were nearing Hank Monk's "piece," I 
became impatient to see the hero of the famous ride. 
What was my disgust when the driver of the earlier 
portion of the road appeared again upon the box in 
charge of six magnificent iron-grays. The peremptory 
cry of " All aboard" brought me without remonstrance 
to the coach, but I took care to get upon the box, al- 
though, as we were starting before the break of day, 
the frost was terrible. To my relief, when I inquired 
after Hank, the driver said that he was at a ball at a 
timber ranch in the forest " six mile on." At early 
light we reached the spot — the summit of the more 
eastern of the twin ranges of the Sierra. Out came 
Hank, amid the cheers of the half dozen men and 
women of the timber ranch who formed the " ball," 
wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and took the reins 
without a word. For miles he drove steadily and 
moodily along. I knew these drivers too well to ven- 
ture upon speaking first when they were in the sulks ; 
at last, however, I lost all patience, and silently ofi'ered 
him a cigar. He took it without thanking me, but 
after a few minutes said : "Thet last driver, how did 
he drive ?" I made some shuffling answer, when he 
cut in: "Drove as ef he were skeert ; and so he was. 
Look at them mustangs, Yoo — ou !" As he yelled, 
the horses started at what out here they style " the 
run ;" and when, after ten minutes, he pulled up, we 
must have done three miles, round most violent and 
narrow turns, with only the bare precipice at the side, 
and a fall of often a hundred feet to the stream at the 



178 GREATER BRITAIN. 

bottom of the ravine — the Simplon without its wall. 
Dropping into the talking mood, he asked me the usual 
questions as to my business, and whither I was bound. 
"When I told him I thought of visiting Australia, he 
said, "D'you tell now! Jess give my love — at Bendigo 
— to Gumption Dick." Not another word about Aus- 
tralia or Gumption Dick could I draw^ from him. I 
asked at Bendigo for Dick ; but not even the officer in 
command of the police had ever heard of Hank Monk's 
friend. 

The sun rose as we dashed through the grand land- 
scapes of Lake Tahoe. On we went, through gloomy 
snow-drifts and still sadder forests of gigantic pines 
nearly three hundred feet in height, and down the can- 
yon of the American River from the second range. 
Suddenly we left the snows, and burst through the 
pine woods into an open scene. Erom gloom there 
was a change to light ; from somber green to gk)wing 
red and gold. The trees, no longer hung with icicles, 
were draped with Spanish moss. In ten yards w^e had 
come from winter into summer. Alkali was left be- 
hind forever ; we were in El Dorado, on the Pacific 
shores — in sunny, dreamy California. 



EL DORADO ITOT 



CHAPTER XX. 

EL DORADO. 

The city of the high priest clothed in robes of gold 
li;»;ures largely in the story of Spanish discovery in 
America. The hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic 
in carav^els and cockboats, and toiled in leathern doub- 
lets and plate armor through the jungle swamp of 
Panama, were lured on through years of plague and 
famine by the dream of a country wliose rivers flowed 
with gold. Diego de Mendoza found the land in 1532, 
but it was not till January, 1848, that James Marshall 
washed the golden sands of El Dorado. 

The Spaniards were not the first to place the earthly 
paradise in America. Not to speak of ISTew Atlantis, 
the Canadian Indians have never ceased to hand down 
to their sons a legend of western abodes of bliss, to 
which their souls journey after death, through frightful 
glens and forests. In their mystic chants they describe 
minutely the obstacfes over which the souls must toil 
to reach the regions of perpetual spring. These stories 
are no mere dreams, but records of the great Indian 
migration from the West: the liquid-eyed Hurons, not 
sprung from the Canadian snows, may be Californian 
if they are not Malay, the Pacific shores their happy 
hunting-ground, the climate of Los Angeles their 
never-ending spring. 

The names The Golden State and El Dorado are 
doubly applicable to California; her light and land- 
scape, as well as her soil, are golden. Here, on the 



180 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Pacific side, nature wears a robe of deep rich yellow: 
even the distant hills, no longer purple, are wrapt in 
golden haze. ISTo more clifl's and canyons — all is 
rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which faces 
eastward, with four thousand feet of wall-like rock, on 
the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the 
Californian vales, and trends away in spurs toward the 
sea. The scenery of the Nevada side was weird, but 
these western foot-hills are unlike anything in the 
world. Drake, who never left the Pacific shores, 
named the country New Albion, from the whiteness 
of a headland on the coast; but the first viceroys were 
less ridiculously misled by patriotic vanity when they 
christened it New Spain. 

In the warm dry sunlight, we rolled down hills of 
rich red loam, and through forests of noble redwood 
— the Sequoia sempervirens, brother to the Sequoia gigan- 
tea, or Wellingtonia of our lawns. Dashing at full gallop 
through the American River, just below its falls, where, 
in 1848, the Mormons first dug that Californian gold 
whi<;h in the interests of their church they had better 
have let alone, we came upon great gangs of Indians 
working by proxy upon the Continental railroad. The 
Indian's plan for living happily is a simple one: he sits 
and smokes in silence while his women work, and he 
thus lives upon the earnings of the squaws. Unlike 
a Mormon patriarch, he contrives that polj^gamy shall 
payj and says with the New Zealand Maori: ''A man 
with one wife may starve, but a man with many wives 
grows fat." These fellows were Shoshon^s from the 
other side of the plateau; for the Pacitio Indians, who 
are black, not red, will not even force their wives to 
work, which, in the opinion of the Western men, is 
the ultimate fo;'m of degradation in a race. Higher 
up the bills, Chinamen alone fvre employed; but their 



EL DORADO. 181 

labor is too costly to be thrown away upon the easier 
work. 

~ In El Dorado City we stayed not long enough for 
the exploration of the once famous surface gold mines, 
now forming one long vineyard, but, rolling on, were 
soon among the tents of Placerville, which had been 
swept w^ith fire a few months before. All these valley 
diggings have been deserted for deep-sinking — not 
that they are exhausted yet, but that the yield has 
ceased to be sufficient to tempt the gambling digger. 
The men w^ho lived in Placerville and made it in- 
famous throughout the world some years ago are scat- 
tered now through Nevada, Arizona, Montana, and 
the Frazer country-, and Chinamen and Digger Indians 
have the old workings to themselves, settling their 
rights as against each other by daily battle and per- 
petual feud. The Digger Indians are the most de- 
graded of all the aborigines of North America — out- 
casts from the other tribes — men under a ban — "tapu," 
as their Maori cousins say — w^eaponless, naked savages 
who live on roots, and pester the industrious Chinese. 
It is not with all their foes that the yellow men can 
cope so easily. In a tiny Chinese theater in their 
camp near Placerville, I saw a farce which to the re- 
mainder of the audience was no doubt a very solemn 
drama, in which the adventures of two Celestials on 
the diggings were given to the world. The only scene 
in which the pantomime w^as sufficiently clear for me 
to read it without the possibility of error was one in 
which a white man— "Melican man" — came to ask 
for taxes. The Chinamen had paid their taxes once 
before, but the fellow said that didn't matter. The 
yellow men consulted together, and at last agreed that 
the stranger was a humbug, so the play ended with 
a big fight, in which they drove him oft" their ground- 

16 



182 GREATER BRITAIN. 

A Chinaman played the over-'cute Yankee, and did 
it well. 

Perhaps the tax-collectors in the remoter districts 
of the States count on the Chinese to make up the 
deficiencies in their accounts caused by the non-pay- 
ment of their taxes by the whites ; for even in these 
days of comparative quiet and civilization, taxes are 
not gathered to their full amount in any of the Terri- 
tories, and the justice of the collector is in Montana 
tempered by many a threat of instant lynching if he 
proceeds with his assessment. Even in Utah, the 
returns are far from satisfactory: the three great 
merchants of Salt Lake City should, if their incomes 
are correctly stated, contribute a heavier sum than 
that returned for the whole of the population of the 
Territory. 

The white diggers who preceded the Chinese have 
left their traces in the names of lodes and places. 
There is no town in California with such a title as the 
Coloradan City of Buckskin Joe, but Yankee Jim 
comes near it. Placerville itself was formerly known 
as Hangtown, on account of its being the city in which 
*'lynch-law was inaugurated." Dead Shot Flat is not 
far from here, and within easy distance are Hell's De- 
light, Jackass Gulch, and Loafer's Hill. The once 
famous Plug-ugly Gulch has now another name; but 
of Chucklehead Diggings and Puppytown I could not 
find the whereabouts in my walks and rides. Grave- 
yard Canyon, Gospel Gulch, and Paint-pot Hill are 
other Californian names. It is to be hoped that the 
English and Spanish names will live unmutilated in 
California and iN'evada, to hand down in liquid syl- 
lables the history of a half-forgotten conquest, an 
already perished race. San Francisco has become 
"Frisco" in speech if not on paper, and Sacramento 



EL DOB ADO. 18 



Q 



will hardly bear the wear and tear of Oalifornian life; 
but the use of the Spanish tongue has spread among 
the Americans who have dealings with the Mexican 
country folk of California State, and, except in mining 
districts, the local names will stand. 

It is not places only that have strange designations 
in America. Out of the Puritan fashion of naming 
children from the Old Testament patriarchs has grown, 
by a sort of recoil, the custom of following the heroes 
of the classics, and when they fail, inventing strange 
titles for children. Mahonri Cahoon lives in Salt Lake 
Gity; Attila Harding was secretary to one of the gov- 
ernors of Utah; Michigan University has for president 
Erastus Haven ; for superintendent, Oramel Hosford ; 
for professors, Abram Sanger, Silas Douglas, Moses 
Gunn, Ziua Pitcher, Alonzo Pitman, De Volson Wood, 
Lucius Chapin, and Corydon Ford. Luman Stevens, 
Bolivar Barnum, Wyllys Ransom, Ozora Stearnes, and 
Buel Derby were Michigan officers during the war, and 
Epaphroditus Ransom v\^as formerly governor of the 
State. Theron Rockwell, Gershon Weston, and Bela 
Kellogg are well-known politicians in Massachusetts, 
and Colonel Liberty Billings is equally prominent in 
Florida. Li J^ew England school-lists it is hard 1o 
pick boys from girls. Who shall tell the sex of Lois 
Lombard, Asahel Morton, Ginery French, Royal Mil- 
ler, Thankful Poyne ? A Chicago man, who was 
lynched in Central Illinois while I was in the neigh- 
borhood, was named Alonza Tibbets. Eliphalet Ar- 
nould and Yelenus Sherman are ranchmen on the 
overland road ; Sereno Burt is an editor in Montana ; 
Persis Boynton a merchant in Chicago. Zelotes Terry, 
Datus Darner, Zeryiah Rainforth, Barzellai Stanton, 
Sardis Clark, Ozias Williams, Xenas Phelps, Converse 
Hopkins, and Hirodshai Blake are names with which I 



184 GREATER BRITAIN. 

have met. Zilpah, Huldah, ^N'abby, Basetha, Minne- 
sota, and Semantha are New England ladies; while onfe 
gentleman of Springfield, lately married, caught a Tar- 
tia. One of the earliest enemies of the Mormons was 
Palatiah Allen ; one of their first converts Preserved 
Harris. Taking the pedigree of Joe Smith, the Mor- 
mon prophet, as that of a representative ISTew England 
family, we shall find that his aunts were Lovisa and 
Lovina Alack, Dolly Smith, Eunice and Miranda 
Pearce ; his uncles. Royal, Ira, and Bushrod Smith. 
His grandfather's name was Asael; of his great aunts 
one was Hephzibah, another Hypsebeth, and another 
Vasta. The prophet's eldest brother's name was Al- 
vin ; his youngest Don Carlos; his sister, Sophronia; 
and his sister-in-law, Jerusha Smith ; while a nephew 
was christened Chilon. One of the nieces was Levira, 
and another liizpah. The first wife of George A. 
Smith, the prophet's cousin, is Bathsheba, and his eld— 
est daughter also bears this name. 

In the smaller towns near Placerville, there is still a 
wide field for the discovery of character as well as 
gold ; but eccentricity among the diggers here seems 
chiefly to waste itself on food. The luxury of this 
Pacific country is amazing. The restaurants and caf(^s 
of each petty digging-town put forth bills-of-fare which 
the "Trios Freres" could not equal for ingenuity; 
wine lists such as Delmonico's cannot beat. The facili--t 
ties are great; except in the far interior or on the hills, 
one even spring reigns unchangeably — summer in all 
except the heat ; every fruit and vegetable of the world 
is perpetually in season. Fruit is not named in the 
hotel bills-of-fare, but all the day long there are piled 
in strange confusion on the tables. Mission grapes, the 
Californian Bartlet pears, Empire apples from Oregon, 
melons — English, Spanish, American and Musk; 



EL DORADO. 185 

peacbes, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All oomers 
may help themselves, and wash down the fruit with 
excellent Californian-made Sauterne. If dancing, gam- 
bling, drinking, and still shorter cuts to the devil have 
their votaries among the diggers, there is no employ- 
ment upon which they so freely spend their cash as on 
dishes cunningly prepared by cooks — Chinese, Italian, 
Bordelais — who follow every "rush." After the doc- 
tor and the coroner, no one makes money at the dig- 
gings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Califor- 
nian soil ; baked rock cod a la Buena Yista, broiled 
Californian quail with Russian River bacon, Sacra- 
mento snipes on toast, Oregon ham with champagne 
sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things — these were 
the dishes on the Placerville bill-of-fare in an hotel 
which had escaped the fire, but whose only guests were 
diggers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes 
were down upon the list : hominy, cod chowder — 
hardly equal, I fear, to that of Salem — sassafras candy, 
and squash tart, but never a mention of pork and 
molasses, dear to the Massachusetts boy. All these 
good things the diggers, when " dirt is plenty," 
moisten with Clicquot, or Heidsick cabinet; when re- 
turns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine. 

Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of 
the cooks. The last " bad shake" was fourteen days 
ago, but it is forgotten in the joy called forth by the 
discovery of a thirteenth way to cook fresh oysters, 
which are brought here from the coast by train. 
There is still a something in Placerville that smacks 
of the time when tin-tacks were selling for their weight 
in gold. 

Wandering through the only remaining street of 
Placerville before I left for the Southern country, I 
saw that grapes were marked ''three cents a pound;' 

16* 



186 GB EATER BRITAIN, 

but as the lowest coin known on the Pacific shores is 
the ten-cent bit, the price exists but upon paper. Three 
pounds of grapes, however, for "a bit" is a practica- 
ble purchase, in which I indulged when starting on my 
journey South : in the towns you have always the hotel 
supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of 
the prosperity of a country, California must stand 
high. ]^ot only is nothing less than the bit, or five- 
pence, known, but when fivepence is deducted from a 
"quarter," or shilling, fivepence is all you get or give 
for change — a gain or loss upon which Californian shop- 
keepers look with profound indifference. 

Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar- 
room than from all the other hundred whisky-shops 
of Placerville, I turned into it to seek the cause, and 
found a Vermonter lecturing on Lincoln and the war 
to an audience of some fifty diggers. The lecturer and 
bar-keeper stood together within the sacred inclosure, 
the one mixinor his drinks, while the other rounded ofi: 
his periods in the inflated Western style. The au- 
dience was critical and cold till near the close of the 
oration, when the " corpse revivers" they were drink- 
ing seemed to take effect, and to be at the bottom 
of the stentorian shout, " Thet's bully," with which 
the peroration was rewarded. The Vermonter told 
me that he had come round from Panama, and was on 
his way to Austin, as Placerville was "played out" 
since its "claims" had "fizzled." 

They have no lecture-room here at present, as it 
seems ; but that there are churches, however small, 
appears from a paragraph in the Placerville news-sheet 
of to-day, which chronicles the removal of a Methodist 
meeting-house from Block A to Block C, vice a Cath- 
olic chapel retired, " having obtained a superior loca- 
tion." 



EL DORADO. 187 

A few days were all that I could spend in the val- 
leys that lie between the Sierra and the Contra Costa 
Hange, basking in a rich sunlight, and unsurpassed in 
the world for climate, scenery, and soil. This single 
State — one of forty-five — has twice the area of Great 
Britain, the most fertile of known soils, and the sun 
and sea-breeze of Greece. Western rhapsodies are the 
expression of the intoxication produced by such a spec- 
tacle; but they are outdone by facts. 

For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the 
palm between the cracks and canyons of the Sierra 
and the softer vales of the Coast Range, where the 
hot sun is tempered by the cool Pacific breeze, and 
thunder and lightning are unknown. To one coming 
from the wilds of the Carson Desert and of Miiage 
Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells 
has for the eye the relief that travelers from the coast 
must seek in the loftier heights and precipices of the 
Yos^mite. The oak-filled valleys of the Contra Costa 
Range have all the pensive repose of the sheltered 
vales that lie between the Apennines and the Adriatic 
from Rimini to Ancona; but California has the advant- 
age in her skies. Italy has the blue, but not the golden 
haze. 

Nothing can be more singular than the variety of 
beauty that lies hid in these Pacific slopes; all that is 
best in Canada and the Eastern States finds more than 
its equal here. The terrible grandeur of Cape Trinite 
on the Saguenay, and the panorama of loveliness from 
the terrace at Quebec, are alike outdone. 

Americans certainly need not go to Europe to find 
scenery; but neither need they go to California, or even 
Colorado. Those who tell us that there is no such 
thing as natural beauty west of the Atlantic can 
scarcely know the Eastern, while they ignore the West- 



188 ORE ATE R BRITAIN. 

em and Central States. The world can show few 
scenes more whining than Israel's River Valley in the 
White Mountains of New Hampshire, or ISTorth Con- 
way in the southern slopes of the same range. [N'othing 
can be more fall of grandeur than the passage of the 
James at Balcony Falls, where the river rushes through 
a crack in the Appalachian chain ; the wilderness ot 
IsTorthern New York is unequaled of its kind, and 
there are delicious landscapes in the Adirondacks. As 
for river scenery, the Hudson is grander than the 
lihine; the Susquehanna is lovelier than the Meuse; 
the Schuylkill prettier than the Seine; the Mohawk 
more enchantino^ than the Dart, Of the rivers ot 
North Europe, the Neckar alone is not beaten in the 
States. 

Americans admit that their scenery is fine, but pre- 
tend that it is wholly wanting in the interest that his- 
toric memories bestow. So-called republicans affect 
to find a charm in Bishop Hatto's Tower which is 
w^anting in Irving's " Sunnyside;" the ten thousand vir- 
gins of Cologne live in their fancy, while Constitution 
Island and Fort Washington are forgotten names. 
Americans or Britishers, we Saxons are all alike — a 
wandering, discontented race; we go 4000 miles to find 
us Sleepy Hollow, or Kilian Van Rensselaer's Castle, 
or Hiawatha's great red pipe-stone quarry; and the 
Americans, who live in the castle, picnic yearly in the 
Hollow, and flood the quarry for a skating-rink, come 
here to England to visit Burns's house, or to sit in Pope's 
arm-chair. 

Down South I saw clearly the truth of a thought that 
struck me before I had been ten minutes west of the 
Sierra Pass. California is Saxon only in the looks and 
language of the people of its towns. In Pennsylvania, 
you may sometimes fancy yourself in Sussex; while m 



EL DORADO. 189 

!N"ew England, 3^011 seem only to be in some part of 
Earope that 3-011 have never happened to light upon 
before ; in California, 3^oa are at last in a new world. 
The hills are weirdly peaked or flattened, the skies are 
new, the birds and plants are new; the atmosphere, 
crisp though warm, is unlike an^^ in the world but that 
of South Australia. It will be strange if the Pacific 
coast does not produce a new school of Saxon poets — 
painters it has already given to the world. 

Returning to Placerville, after an eventless explora- 
tion of the exquisite scenery to the south, I took the 
railway once again, for the first time since I had left 
Manhattan City — 1800 miles away — and was soon in 
Sacramento, the State capital, now recovering slowly 
from the flood of 1862. Near the city I made out Oak 
Grove — famed for duels between well-known Califor- 
niaus. Here it was that General Denver, State Sena- 
tor, shot Mr. Gilbert, the representative in Congress, 
in a duel fought with rifles. Here, too, it was that 
Mr. Thomas, district attorney for Placer County, killed 
Dr. Dickson, of the Marine Hospital, in a duel with 
pistols in 1854. Records of duels form a serious part 
of the State history. At Lone Mountain Cemetery 
near San Francisco, there is a great marble monument 
to the Hon. David Broderick, shot by Chief Justice 
Terry, of the Supreme Court, in 1859. 

A few hours' quiet steaming in the sunlight down 
the Sacramento River, past Rio Vista and Montezuma, 
through the gap in the Contra Costa Range, at which 
the grand volcanic peak of Monte Diablo stands sen- 
tinel watchina: over the Martinez Straits, an-d there 
opened to the south and west a vast mountain-sur- 
rounded bay. Volumes of cloud were rolling in un- 
ceasingly from the ocean, through the Golden Gate, 
past the fortified island of Alcatras, and spending 



190 GREATER BRITAIN. 

themselves in the opposite shores of San Rafael, Be- 
nicia, and Vallejo. At last I was across the continent, 
and face to face with the Pacific. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

LYNCH LAW. 

" Californians are called the scum of the earth, yet 
their great city is the best policed in the world," said 
a New York friend to me, when he heard that I 
thouiifht of crossing the continent to San Francisco. 

" Them I^ew Yorkers is a sight too fond of looking 
after other people's morals," replied an old "Forty- 
niner," to whom I repeated this phrase, having first 
toned it down however. " Still," he went on, " our 
history's baddish, but it ain't for us to play showman 
to our own worst pints : — let every man skin his own 
skunk !" 

The story of the early days of San Francisco, as to 
which my curiosity was thus excited, is so curious an 
instance of the development of an English community 
under the most inauspicious circumstances, that the 
whole time which I spent in the city itself I devoted 
to hearing the tale from those who knew the actors. 
Not only is the history of the two Vigilance Commit- 
tees in itself characteristic, but it works in with what 
I had gathered in Kansas, and Illinois, and Colorado 
as to the operation of the claim-clubs ; and the stories, 
taken together, form a typical picture of the rise of a 
New English country. 



LYNCH LAW. ]91 

The discovery of gold in 1848 brought down on 
luckless California the idle, the reckless, the vaga- 
bonds first of Polynesia, then of all the world. Street 
fighting, public gaming, masked balls given by un- 
known women and paid for nobody knew how, but 
attended by governor, supervisors, and alcalde — all 
these were minor matters by the side of the general 
uudetined rufiianism of the place. Before the end of 
1849, San Francisco presented on a gigantic scale 
much the same appearance that Helena in Montana 
wears in 1866. 

Desperadoes poured in from all sides, the best of 
the bad flocking ofi:* to the mines, while the worst 
among the villains — those who lacked energy as well 
as moral sense — remained in the city, to raise by 
thieving or in the gambling-booth the "pile" that 
they w^ere too indolent to earn by pick and pan. 
Hundreds of *' emancipists" from Sydney, "old lags" 
from Norfolk Island, the pick of the criminals of Eng- 
land, still further trained and confirmed in vice and 
crime by the experiences of Macquarie Harbor and 
Port Arthur, rushed to San Francisco to continue a 
career which the vigilance of the police made hope- 
less in Tasmania and New South Wales. The floating 
vice of the Pacific ports of South America soon gath- 
ered to a spot where there were not only men to 
fleece, but men w4io, being fleeced, could pay. The 
police were necessarily few, for, appoint a man to-day, 
and to-morrow he was gone to the placers with some 
new friend; those who could be prevailed upon to 
remain a fortnight in the force were accessible to 
bribes from the men they were set to watch. They 
themselves admitted their inaction, but ascribed it to 
the continual change of place among the criminals, 
which prevented the slightest knowledge of their 



192 GREATER BRITAIN. 

charocters and haunts. The Australian jail -birds 
formed a quarter known as "Sydney Town," which 
soon became what the Bay of Islands had been ten 
yearc before — the Alsatia of the Paciiic. In spite of 
daily murders, not a single criminal was hanged. 

The ruffians did not all agree: there were jealousies 
among the various bands; feuds between the Aus- 
tralians and Chilians ; between the Mexicans and the 
I^ew Yorkers. Under the various names of "Hounds," 
"Regulators," "Sydney ducks," and "Sydney coves," 
the English convict party organized themselves in op- 
position to the Chilenos as well as to the police and 
law-abiding citizens. Gangs of villains, whose sole 
bond of union w^as robbery or murder, marched, 
armed with bludgeons and revolvers, every Sunday 
afternoon, to the sound of music, unhindered through 
the streets, professing that they were "guardians of 
the community" against the Spaniards, Mexicans, and 
South Americans. 

At last a movement took place among the mer- 
chants and reputable inhabitants w^hich resulted in 
the break-up of the Australian gangs. By an upris- 
ing of the American citizens of San Francisco, in 
response to a proclamation by T. M. Leavenworth, 
the alcalde, twenty of the most notorious among the 
"Hounds" were seized and shipped to China: it is 
believed that some were taken south in irons, and 
landed near Cape Horn. "Anywhere so that they 
could not come back," as my informant said. 

For a week or two things went well, but a fresh im- 
pour of rogues and villains soon swamped the volun- 
teer police by sheer force of numbers ; and in Febru- 
ary, 1851, occurred an instance of united action among 
the citizens which is noticeable as the forerunner of 
the Vigilance Committees. A Mr. Jansen bad been 



LYNCH LAW. 193 

Blanued by a blow from a slung-shot, and his person 
and premises rifled by Australian thieves. During the 
examination of two prisoners arrested on suspicion, 
■^VQ thousand citizens gathered round the City Hall, 
and handbills were circulated in which it was proposed 
that the prisoners should be lynched. In the afternoon 
an attempt to seize the men was made, but repulsed by 
another section of the citizens — the Washington Guard. 
A met^ting was held on the plaza, and a committee ap- 
pointe(i to watch the authorities, and prevent a release. 
A well- known citizen, Mr. Brannan, made a speech, 
in whicii he said: "We, the people, are the mayor, 
the reccv-der, and the laws." The alcalde addressed 
the crowd, and suggested, byway of compromise, that 
they shobxd elect a jury, which should sit in the regu- 
lar court, and try the prisoners. This was refused, and 
the peoplt^ elected not only a jury, but three judges, a 
sheriff, a rlerk, a public prosecutor, and two counsel 
for the detense. This court then tried the prisoners 
in their absence, and the jury failed to agree — nine 
were for conviction, and three were doubtful. "Hang 
'em, anyhow; majority rules," was the shout, but the 
popular judges stood firm, and discharged their jury, 
while the people acquiesced. The next day the pris- 
oners were tried and convicted by the regular court, al- 
though they were ultimately found to be innocent men. 

Matters now went from bad to worse: five times 
San Francisco was swept from end to end by fires 
known to have been helped on, if not originally kin- 
dled, by incendiaries in the hope of plunder ; and when, 
by the fires of May and June, 1851, hardly a house 
was left untouched, the pious Bostonians held up their 
hands, and cried " Gomorrah!" 

Immediately after the discovery that the June fire 
was not an accident, the Vigilance Committee was 

It 



194 GREATER BRITAIN. 

formed, being self-appointed, and consisting of the 
foremost merchants in the place. This was on the 7th 
of June, according to my friend; on the 9th, accord- 
ing to the Californian histories. It was rumored that 
the committee consisted of two hundred citizens ; it 
was known that they were supported by the whole of 
the city press. They published a declaration, in which 
they stated that there is " no security for life or prop- 
erty under the . . . law as now administered." This 
they ascribed to the " quibbles of the law," the " cor- 
ruption of the police," the "insecurity of prisons," 
the " laxity of those who pretend to administer jus- 
tice." The secret instructions to the committee 
contained a direction that the members should at 
once assemble at the committee-room whenever sig- 
nals, consisting of two taps on a bell, were heard at in- 
tervals of one minute. The committee was organized 
with president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, ser- 
geant-at-arms, standing committee on qualifications, 
and standing committee of finance. No one was to be ad- 
mitted a member unless he were a " respectable citizen, 
and approved by the Committee on Qualifications." 

The very night of their organization, according to the 
histories, or three nights later, according to my friend 
Mr. A— ^ — , the work of the committee began. Some 
boatmen at Central Wharf saw something which led 
them to follow out into the Yerba Buena cove a man, 
whom they captured after a sharp row. As they over- 
hauled him, he threw overboard a safe, just stolen from 
a bank, but this was soon fished out. He was at once 
carried ofi" to the coraraittee-room of the Yigilants, 
and the bell of the Monumental Engine Company 
struck at intervals, as the rule prescribed. JS'ot only 
the committee, but a vast surging crowd collected, 
although midnight was now past. A was on the 



LYNCH LAW. 195 

plaza, and says that every man was ^rmed, and evi- 
dently disposed to back up the committee. Accord- 
ing to the Alta Californian, the chief of the police came 
up a little before 1 a.m., and tried to force an entrance 
to the room ; but he was met, politely enough, with a 
show of revolvers sufficient to annihilate his men, so 
he judged it prudent to retreat. 

At one o'clock, the bell of the engine-house began 
to toll, and the crowd became excited. Mr. Brannan 
came out of the committee-room, and, standing on a 
mound of sand, addressed the citizens. As well as my 
friend could remember, his words were these : " Gen- 
tlemen, the man — Jenkins by name — a Sydney con- 
vict, whose supposed offense you know, has had a fair 
trial before eighty gentlemen, and been unanimously 
found guilty by them. I have been deputed by the com- 
mittee to ask whether it is your pleasure that he be 
hanged." " Ay !" from every man in the crowd. 
" He will be given an hour to prepare for death, and 
the Rev. Mr. Mines has been already sent for to min- 
ister to him. Is this your pleasure ?" Again a storm 
of " Ay !" E'othing was known in the crowd of the 
details of the trial, except that counsel had been heard 
on the prisoner's behalf. For another hour the excite- 
ment of the crowd was permitted to continue, but at 
two o'clock the doors of the committee-room were 
thrown open, and Jenkins was seen smoking a cigar. 
Mr. A said that he did not believe the prisoner ex- 
pected a rescue, but thought that an exhibition of pluck 
might make popular with the crowd, and save him. A 
procession of Vigilants with drawn Colts was then 
formed, and set off' in the moonlight across the four 
chief streets to the plaza. Some of the people shouted 
" To the flagstaff!" but there came a cry, '' "Don't dese- 
crate the Liberty Pole. To the old adobe ! the old 



196 greatje:r Britain. 

adobe !" and to the old adobe custom-bouse the prisoner 
was dragged. In five minutes he was hanging from 
the roof, three hundred citizens lending a hand at the 

rope. At six in the morning, A went home, but 

he heard that the police cut down the body about that 
time, and carried it to the coroner's house. 

An inquest was held next day. The city ofiicers 
swore that they had done all they could to prevent the 
execution, but they refused to give up the names 
of the Vigilance Committee. The members them- 
selves were less cautious. Mr. Brannan and others 
came forward of their own proper motion, and dis- 
closed all the circumstances of the trial : 140 of the 
committee backed them up by a written protestation 
against interference with the Vigilants, to which their 
signatures were appended. Protest and evidence have 
been published, not only in the newspapers of the time, 
but in the San Francisco "Annals." The coroner's 
jury found a verdict of ^' Strangulation, consequent on 
the concerted action of a body of citizens calling them- 
selves a Committee of Vigilance." An hour after the 
verdict was given, a mass meeting of the whole of the 
respectable inhabitants was held in the plaza, and a 
resolution approving of the action of the committee 
passed by acclamation. 

In July, 1851, the committee hanged another man on 
the Market Street wharf, and appointed a sub-commit- 
tee of thirty to board every ship that crossed the bar, 
seize all persons suspected of being " Sydney Coves," 
and reship them to E^ew South Wales. 

In August came the great struggle between the 
Vigilants and constituted authority. It was sharp and 
decisive. Whittaker and McKenzie, two Sydney 
Coves, were arrested by the committee for various 
crimes, and sentenced to death. The next day, Sheriff 



LYNCH LAW. 197 

Hays seized them on a writ of habeas corpus, in the 
rooms of the committee. The bell was tolled: the 
citizens assembled, the Yigilants told their story, the 
men were seized once more, and by noon they were 
hanging from the loft of the committee-house, by the 
ordinary lifting tackle for heavy goods. Fifteen thou- 
sand people were present, and approved. "After this," 
said A , "there could be no mistake about the cit- 
izens supporting the committee." 

By September, the Vigilants had transported all the 
*' Coves" on whom they could lay hands; so they issued 
a proclamation, declaring that for the future they would 
confine themselves to aiding the law by tracing out 
and guarding criminals; and in pursuance of their de- 
cision, they soon afterward helped the authorities in 
preventing the lynching of a ship-captain for cruelty to 
his men. 

After the great sweep of 1851, things became steadily 
worse again till they culminated in 1855, a year to 
wdiich my friend looked backed with horror, l^ot 
counting Indians, there were four hundred persons 
died by violence in California in that single year. 
Fifty of these were lynched, a dozen were hanged by 
law, a couple of dozen shot by the sherifis and tax-col- 
lectors in the course of their duty. The officers did 
not escape scot free. The under-sheriif of San Fran- 
cisco was shot in Mission Street, in broad daylight, by 
a man upon whom he was trying to execute a writ ot 
ejectment- 
Judges, mayors, supervisors, politicians, all were bad 
alike. The merchants of the city were from ]^ew 
England, New York, and foreign lands; but the men 
who assumed the direction of public afiairs, and espe- 
cially of public funds, were Southerners, many of them 
"Border Ruffians' ' of the most savage stamp — * Pikes," 

It* 



198 GREATER BRITAIN. 

aa they were called, from Pike's County in Missouri, 
from which their leaders came. Instead of banding 
themselves together to oppose the laws, these rogues 
and ruffians found it easier .to control the making of 
them. Their favorite method of defeating their Kew 
England foes was by the simple plan of "stuffing," or 
filling the ballot-box with forged tickets when the elec- 
tions were concluded. Two Irishmen — Casey and Sul- 
livan — were their tools in this shameful work. Werth, 
a Southerner, the leader of Casey's gang, had been de- 
nounced in the San Francisco Bulletin as the murderer 
of a man named Kittering; and Casey, meeting James 
King, editor of the Bulletin^ shot him dead in Mont- 
gomery Street in the middle of the day. Casey and 
one of his assistants — a man named Cora — were hanged 
by the people as Mr. King's body was being carried to 
the grave, and Sullivan committed suicide the same 
day. 

Books were opened for the enrollment of the names 
of those who were prepared to support the committee : 
nine thousand grown white males inscribed themselves 
within four days. Governor Johnson at once declared 
that he should suppress the committee, but the City of 
Sacramento prevented war by ofiering a thousand men 
for the Vigilants' support, the other Californian cities 
following suit. The committee got together 6000 
stand of arms and thirty cannon, and fortified their 
rooms with earthworks and barricades. The gov- 
ernor, having called on the general commanding the 
Federal forces at Benicia, who wisely refused to inter- 
fere, marched upon the city, was surrounded, and 
taken prisoner with all his forces without the striking 
of a blow. 

Having now obtained the control of the State gov- 
ernment, the committee proceeded to banish all the 



LYNCH LAW, 199 

"Pikes" and "Pukes." Four were hanged, forty 
transported, and many ran away. This done, the 
committee prepared an elaborate report upon the prop- 
erty and finances of the State, and then, after a great 
parade, ten regiments strong, upon the plaza and 
through the streets, they adjourned forever, and "the 
thirty- three" and their ten thousand backers retired 
into private life once more, and put an end to this sin- 
gular spectacle of the rebellion of a free people against 
rulers nominally elected by itself. As my friend said, 
when he finished his long yarn, " This has more than 
archseologic interest: we may live too see a similar 
Vigilance Committee in IsTew York." 

For my own part, I do not believe that an uprising 
against bad government is possible in ISTew York City, 
because there the supporters of bad government are a 
majority of the people. Their interest is the other 
way: in increased city taxes they evidently lose far 
more than, as a class, they gain by what is spent among 
them in corruption ; but when they come to see this, 
they will not rebel against their corrupt leaders, but 
elect those whom they can trust. In San Francisco, 
the case was widely different : through the ballot frauds, 
a majority of the citizens were being infamously mis- 
governed by a contemptible minority, and the events 
of 1856 were only the necessary acts of the majority to 
regain their power, coupled with certain exceptional 
acts in the shape of arbitrary transportation of " Pikes" 
and Southern rowdies, justified by the exceptional cir- 
cumstances of the young community. At Melbourne, 
under circumstances somewhat similar, our English 
colonists, instead of setting up a committee, built Pent- 
ridge Stockade with walls some thirty feet high, and 
created a military police, with almost arbitrary power. 
The difference is one of words. The whirl of life in a 



200 GHEATER BRITAIN. 

young gold country not only prevents the best men en- 
tering the political field, and so forces citizens to exer- 
cise their right of choice only between candidates of 
equal badness, but so engrosses the members of the 
community who exercise the ballot as to prevent the 
detection of fraud till it has ruled for years. Through- 
out young countries generally you find men say : ''Yes ! 
we're robbed, we know; but no one has time to go into 
that." " I'm for the old men," said a Californian elector 
once, *' for they've plundered us so long that they're 
gorged, and can't swallow any more." "No," said 
another, "let's have fresh blood. Give every man a 
chance of robbing the State. Shape and share alike." 
The wonder is, nol that in such a State as California 
was till lately the machinery of government should work 
unevenly, but that it should work at all. Democracy 
has never endured so rough a test as that from wdiich 
it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden State and 
City. 

The public spirit with which the merchants came for- 
ward and gave time and money to the cause of order is 
worthy of all praise, and the rapidity with which the 
organization of a new government was carried through 
is an instance of the singular power of our race for 
building up the machinery of self-government under 
conditions the most unpromising. Instead of the events 
of 1856 having been a case of opposition to law and 
order, they will stand in history as a remarkable proof 
of the law-abiding character of a people who vindicated 
justice by a demonstration of overwhelming force, laid 
down their arms, and returned in a few weeks to the 
peaceable routine of business life. 

If, in the merchant founders of the Vigilance Com- 
mittees of San Francisco we can see the descendants of 
the justice-loving Germans of the time of Tacitus, I 



LYNCH LAW. 201 

found in another class of vigilants the moral offspring 
of Alfred's village aldermen of our own Saxon age. 
From Mr. William M. Byers, now editor of the Rocky 
Mountain News, I had heard the story of the early set- 
tlers' land-law in Missouri; in Stanton's office in Den- 
ver City, I had seen the records of the Arrapahoe 
County Claim-club, with which he had been connected 
at the first settlement of Colorado; but at San Jos^, I 
heard details of the settlers' custom law — the Califor- 
nian "grand-coutumier," it might be called — which 
convinced me that, in order to find the rudiments of 
all that, politically speaking, is best and most vigorous 
in the Saxon mind, you must seek countries in which 
Saxon civilization itself is in its infancy. The greater 
the difficulties of the situation, the more racy the cus- 
tom, the more national the law. 

When a new State began to be "settled up" — 
that is, its lands entered upon by actual settlers, not 
landsharks — the inhabitants often found themselves 
in the wilderness, far in advance of attorneys, courts, 
and judges. It was their custom when this occurred 
to divide the territory into districts of fifteen or 
twenty miles square, and form for each a ^'claim- 
club" to protect the land-claims, or property of the 
members. Whenever a question of title arose, a judge 
and jury were chosen from among the members to 
hear and determine the case. The occupancy title 
Avas invariably protected up to a certain number of 
acres, which was differently fixed by different clubs, 
and varied in those of which I have heard the rules 
from 100 to 250 acres, averaging 150. The United 
States "Homestead" and "Pre-emption" laws were 
founded on the practice of these clubs. The claim- 
clubs interfered only for the protection of their mem- 
bers, but they never scrupled to hang willful offenders 



202 GEE ATE R BRITAIN. 

against their rules, whether members or outsiders. 
Execution of the decrees of the club was generally 
left to the county sheriff, if he w^as a member, and in 
this case a certain air of legality was given to the local 
action. It is perhaps not too much to say that a 
Western sheriff is an irresponsible official, possessed 
of gigantic powers, but seldom known to abuse them. 
He is a Csesar, chosen for his honesty, fearlessness, 
clean shooting, and quick loading, by men who know 
him well: if he breaks down, he is soon deposed, and 
a better man chosen for dictator. I have known a 
Western paper say: "Frank is our man for sheriff, 
next October. See the way he shot one of the fellows 
who robbed his store, and followed up the other, and 
shot him too the next day. Frank is the boy for us." 
In such a state of society as this, the distinction be- 
tween law and lynch-law can scarcely be said to exist, 
and in the eyes of every Western settler the claim- 
club backed by the sherift''8 name was as strong and 
as full of the majesty of the law as the Supreme Court 
of the United States. Mr. layers told me of a case of 
the infliction of death-punishment by a claim-club 
which occurred in Kansas after the "Homestead" law 
was passed allowing the occupant when he had tilled 
and improved the land for live years, to purchase it at 
one and a quarter dollars an acre. A man Bettled on 
a piece of land, and labored on it for some 'years. He 
then "sold it," which he had, of course, no power to 
do, the land being still the property of the United 
States. Having done this, h^ went and "pre-empted" 
it under the Homestead Act, at the government price. 
When he attempted to .eject the man to whom he had 
assumed to sell, the club ordered the sheriff' to "put 
the man away," and he w^as never seen again. Perhaps 
Mr. Byers was the sheriff; he seemed to have thy de- 



LYNCH LAW. 203 

tails at his fingers' ends, and his later history in Denver, 
where he once had the lynching rope round his neck 
for exposing gamblers, testifies to his boldness. 

Some of the rascalities which the claim-clubs were 
expected to put down were ingenious enough. Some- 
limes a man would build a dozen houses on a block of 
land, and, going there to enter on possession after they 
were complete, would find that in the night the whole 
of them had disappeared. Frauds under the Home- 
stead Act were both many and strange. Men were re- 
quired to prove that they had on the land a house of 
at least ten feet square. They have been known to 
whittle out a toy-house with their bowie, and, carrying 
it to the land, to measure it in the presence of a friend 
—twelve inches by thirteen. In court the pre-emptor, 
examining his own witness, would say, " What are the 
dimensions of that house of mine T^ " Twelve by thir- 
teen." ^' That will do." In Kansas a log-house of the 
regulation size was fitted up on wheels, and let at ten 
dollars a day, in order that it might be wheeled on to 
difierent lots, to be sworn to as a house upon the land. 
Men have been known to make a window-sash and 
frame, and keep them inside of their windowless huts, 
to swear that they had a window in their house— -an- 
other of the requirements of the act. It is a singular 
mark of deference to the traditions of a Puritan an- 
cestry that such accomplished liars as the Western land- 
sharks should feel it necessary to have any foundation 
whatever for their lies; but not only in this respect 
are they a curious race. One of their peculiarities is 
that, however wealthy they may be, they will never 
place their money out at interest, never sink it in a 
speculation, however tempting, when there is no pros- 
pect of almost immediate realization. To turn their 
money over often, at whatever risk, is with these men 



204 GREATER BRITAIN. 

ati axiom. The advanced-guard of civilization, tliey 
push out into an unknown wilderness, and seize upon 
the available lots, the streams, the springs, the river 
bottoms, the falls or "water-privileges," and then, 
using their interest in the territorial legislature — using, 
perhaps, direct corruption in some cases — they procure 
the location of the State capital upon their lands, or 
the passage of the railroads through their valleys. 
The capital of ISTebraska has been fixed in this manner 
at a place two hundred and fifty miles from the near- 
est settlement. A newspaper appeared suddenly, dated 
from "Lincoln City, center of Nebraska Territory," 
but published in reality in Omaha. To cope with such 
fellows, Western sheriffs must be no ordinary men. 

Thanks to the Vigilance Committees, California 
stands now before the other far-western States. Row- 
dyism is being put down as the God-fearing ISTorthern- 
ers gain ground. It may still be dangerous to stroke 
your beard in a bar-room at Placerville or El Dorado * 
"a gentleman in the loafing and chancing line" may 
still be met with in Sacramento; here and there a 
Missourian "Pike," as yet unhung, may boast that he 
can whip his weight in wild cats, — but San Francisco 
has at least reached the age of outward decorum, has 
shut up public gaming-houses, and supports four church 
papers. 

In Colorado lynch law is not as yet forgotten : the 
day we entered Denver the editor of the Gazette ex- 
pressed, " on historical grounds," his deep regret at the 
cutting down of two fine cotton wood-trees that stood 
on Cherry Creek. When we came to talk to him we 
found that the "history" alluded to was that of the 
" escape up " these trees of many an early inhabitant 
of Denver City. " There's the tree we used to put the 
jury un(}er, and that's the one we hanged 'em on. Put 



LYNCH LAW. 205 

a cart nnder the tree, and the boy standing on it, with 
the rope around him ; give him time for a pray, then 
smack the whip, and ther' you air." 

In Denver we were reserved upon the subject of 
Vigilance Committees, for it is dangerous sometimes 
to make close inquiries as to their constitution. While 
I was in Leavenworth a man was hanged by the mob 
at Council Bluffs for asking the names of the Vigilants 
who had hanged a friend of his the year before. We 
learned enough, however, at Denver to show that the 
committee in that city still exists; and in Virginia and 
Carson I know that the organizations are continued; 
but offenders are oftener shot quietly than publicly 
hanged, in order to prevent an outcry, and avoid the 
vengeance of the relatives. The verdict of the jury 
never fails to be respected, but acquittal is almost as 
unknown as mercy to those convicted. Innocent men 
are seldom tried before such juries, for the case must 
be clear before the sheriff will run the risk of being 
shot in making the arrest. When the man's fate is 
settled, the sheriff' drives out quietly in his buggy, and 
next day men say when they meet, " Poor *s es- 
caped ;" or else it is, " The sheriff''s shot. Who'll run 
for office?'' 

It will be seen from the history of the Vigilance 
Committees, as I heard their stories from Kansas to 
California, that they are to be divided into two classes, 
with sharply-marked characteristics — those where com- 
mittee hangings, transportations, warnings, are alike 
open to the light of day, such as the committees of 
San Francisco in 1856, and the Sandwich Islands in 
1866, and those — unhappily the vast majority — where 
all is secret and irresponsible. Here, in San Francisco, 
the committee was the government; elsewhere, the 
organization was less wide, and the members, though 

18 



206 GREATER BRITAIN, 

always shrewdly guessed at, never known. Neithei 
class should be necessary, unless when a gold rush 
brings down upon a State the desperadoes of the world; 
but there is this encouragement even in the history of 
lynch law: that, although English settlements often 
start wild, they never have been known to go wild. 

The men who formed the second Vigilance Commit- 
tee of San Francisco are now the governor, Senators, 
and Congressmen of California, the mayors and sheriffs 
of her towns. Nowadays the citizens are remarkable, 
even among Americans, for their love of law and order. 
Their city, though still subject to a yearly deluge from 
the outpourings of all the overcrowded slums of Eu- 
rope, is, as the i^ew Yorker said, the best policed in 
all America. In politics, too, it is remarked that 
party organizations have no power in this State from 
the moment that they attempt to nominate corrupt or 
time-serving men. The people break loose from their 
caucuses and conventions, and vote in a body for their 
honest enemies, rather than for corrupt friends. They 
have the advantage of singular ability, for there is not 
an average man in California. 



GOLDEN CITY. 207 



CHAPTER XXII. 

GOLDEN CITY. 

The first letter which I delivered in San Francisco 
was from a Mormon gentleman to a merchant, who, as 
he read it, exclaimed: ^' Ah! so you want to see the 
lions ? I'll pick you up at three, and take you there.'' 
I wondered, but went, as travelers do. 

At the end of a pleasant drive along the best road 
in all America, I found myself upon a cliff overhanging 
the Pacific, with a glorious outlook, seaward toward 
the Farallones, and northward to Cape Benita and the 
Golden Gate. Beneath, a few hundred yards from 
shore, was a conical rock, covered with shapeless mon- 
sters, plashing the wa,ter and roaring ceaselessly, while 
others swam around. These were *'the lions," my 
acquaintance said — the sea-lions. I did not enter upon 
an explanation of our slang phrase, ''the lions" which 
the Mormon, himself an Englishman, no doubt had 
used, but took the first opportunity of seeing the re- 
mainder of " the lions" of the Golden City. 

The most remarkable spot in all America is Mission 
Dolores, in the outskirts of San Francisco City — once 
a settlement of the Society of Jesus,, and now partly 
blanket factory and partly church. Nowhere has the 
conflict between the Saxon and Latin races been so 
sharp and so decisive. For eighty or ninety years 
California was first Spanish, then Mexican, then a half 
independent Spanish-American republic. The pro- 
gress of those ninety years was shown in the founda- 



208 GREATER BRITAIN. 

tion of half a dozen Jesuit "missions," which held 
each of them a thousand or two tame Indians as slaves, 
while a few military settlers and their friends divided 
the interior with the savage tribes. Gold, which had 
been discovered here by Drake, was never sought : the 
fathers, like the Mormon chiefs, discouraged mining; 
it interfered with their tame Indians. Here and there, 
in four cases, perhaps, in all, a presidio, or castle, had 
been built for the protection of the mission, and a 
puebla, or tiny free town, had been suffered to grow 
up, not without remonstrance from the fathers. Los 
Angeles had thus sprung from the mission of that 
name, the fishing village of Yerba Buena, from Mis- 
sion Dolores on the bay of San Francisco, and San Jos^, 
from Santa Clara. In 1846, Fremont the Pathfinder 
conquered the country with forty-t^;vo men, and now it 
has a settled population of nearly half a million ; San 
Francisco is as large as Newcastle or Hull, as flourish- 
ing as Liverpool, and the Saxon blanket factory has 
replaced the Spanish mission. The story might have 
served as a warning to the French Emperor, when he 
sent ships and men to found a "Latin empire in 
America." 

Between the presidio and the Mission Dolores lieg. 
Lone Mountain Cemetery, in that solitary calm and 
majesty of beauty which befits a home for the dead, 
the most lovely of all the cemeteries of America. 
Queen Emma, of the Sandwich Islands, who is here at 
present, said of it yesterday to a Californian merchant: 
" How comes it that you Americans, who live so fast, 
find time to bury your dead so beautifully ?" 

Lone Mountain is not the only delicious spot that is 
given to the American dead. Laurel Hill, Mount Au- 
burn, Greenwood, Cypress Grove, Hollywood, Oak 
Hill, are names not more full of poetry than are the 



GOLDEN CITY, 209 

places to which they belong ; but Lone Mountain has 
over all an advantage in its giant fuchsias, and scarlet 
geraniums of the size and shape of trees; in the distant 
glimpses, too, of the still Pacific. 

San Francisco is ill placed, so far as mere building 
facilities are concerned. When the first houses were 
built in 1845 and 1846, they stood on a strip of beach 
surrounding the sheltered cove of Yerba Buena, and 
at the foot of the steep and lofty sand-hills. Dunes 
and cove have disappeared together; the hills have been 
shot bodily into the bay, and the former harbor is now 
the business quarter of the city. ITot a street can be 
built without cutting down a hill, or filling up a glen. 
Never was a great town built under heavier difficulties; 
but trade requires it to be exactly where it is, and there 
it will remain and grow. Its former rivals, Yallejo 
and Benicia, are grass-grown villages, in spite of their 
having had the advantage of " a perfect situation." 
While the spot on which the Golden City stands was 
still occupied by the struggling village of Yerba Buena, 
Francisca was a rising city, where corner lots were 
worth their ten or twenty thousand dollars. When 
the gold rush came, the village, shooting to the front, 
voted itself the name of its great bay, and Francisca 
had to change its title to Benicia, in order not to be 
thought a mere suburb of San Francisco. The mouth 
of the Columbia was once looked to as the future 
haven of Western America, and point of convergence 
of the railroad lines; but the " center of the universe'' 
has not more completely removed from Independence 
to Fort Hiley than Astoria has yielded to San Fran- 
cisco the claim to be the port of the Pacific. 

The one great danger of this coast all its cities share 
in common. Three times within the present century, 
the spot on which San Francisco stands has been vio- 

18* 



210 GREATER BRITAIN. 

lently disturbed by subterranean forces. The earth- 
quake of last year has left its mark upon Montgomery 
Street and the plaza, for it frightened the San Fran- 
ciscans into putting up light wooden cornices to hotels 
and banks, instead of the massive stone projections 
that are common in the States ; otherwise, though 
lesser shocks are daily matters, the San Franciscans 
have forgotten the "great scare." A year is along 
time in California. There is little of the earliest San 
Francisco left, though the city is only eighteen years 
old. Fires have done good work as well as harm, and 
it is worth a walk up to the plaza to see how prim and 
starched are the houses which now occupy a square 
three sides of which were, in 1850, given up to the 
public gaming-hells. 

One of the few remaining bits of old Golden City 
life is to be found in the neighborhood of the " What 
Cheer House," the resting-place of diggers on their way 
from the interior to take ship for IS'ew York or Europe. 
Here there is no lack of coin, no want of oaths, no 
scarcity of drinks. " Juleps" are as plentiful as in Bal- 
timore itself; Yerba Buena, the old name for San 
Francisco, means " mint." 

If the old character of the city is gone, there are still 
odd scenes to be met with in its streets. To-day I saw 
a master builder of great wealth with his coat and 
waistcoat off, and his hat stowed away on one side, 
carefully teaching a raw Irish lad how to lay a brick. 
He told me that the acquisition of the art would bring 
the man an immediate rise in his wages from ^wq to 
ten shillings a day. Unskilled labor, Mexican and 
Chinese, is plentiful enough, but white artisans are 
scarce. The want of servants is such, that even the 
wealthiest inhabitants live with their wives and families 
in hotels, to avoid the cost and trouble of an establish- 



- GOLDEN CITY. 211 

ment. Those who have houses pay rough unkempt 
Irish girls from £6 to £8 a month, with board, '' out- 
ings" when they please, and " followers" unlimited. 

The hotel boarding has much to do with the some- 
what unwomanly manner of a few among the ladies of 
the newest States, but the effect upon the children is 
more marked than it is upon their mothers. To a 
w^oman of wealth, it matters, perhaps, but little whether 
she rules a household of her own, or boards in the first 
floor of some gigantic hostelry; but it does matter a 
great deal to her children, who, in the one case, have 
a home to play and work in, and who, in the other, 
play on the stairs or in the corridors, to the annoyance 
of every sojourner in the hotel, and never dream of 
work out of school-hours, or of solid reading that is not 
compulsory. The only one of the common charges 
brought against America in English society and 
in English books and papers that is thoroughly 
true, is the statement that American children, as 
a rule, are *' forward," ill mannered, and immoraL 
An American can scarcely be found who does not 
admit and deplore the fact. With the self-exposing 
honesty that is a characteristic of their nation, Ameri- 
can gentlemen will talk by the hour of the terrible 
profligacy of the young ^ew Yorkers. Boys, they tell 
you, who in England would be safe in the lower school 
at Eton or in well-managed houses, in New York or 
New Orleans are deep gamesters and God-defying row- 
dies. In New England, things are better; in the West, 
there is yet time to prevent the ill arising; but even in 
the most old-fashioned of American States, the children 
are far too fall of self-assurance. Their faults are 
chiefly faults of manner, but such in children, have a 
tendency to become so many vices. On my way home 
from Egypt, I crossed the Simplon with a Southerner 



212 GREATER BRITAIN. 

9 

and a Pennsylvanian boy of fourteen or fifteen. An 
English boy would have expressed his opinion, and 
been silent : this lad's attacks upon the poor Southerner 
were unceasing and unfeeling; yet I could see that he 
was good at bottom. I watched my chance to give him 
my view of his conduct, and when we parted, he came 
up and shook hands, saying : " You're not a bad fellow 
for a Briti^v r, after all." 

In my walks through the city I found its climate 
agreeabio rather for work than idleness. Sauntering 
or lounging is as little possible as it is in London. The 
summer is not yet ended; and in the summer at San 
Francisco it is cold after eleven in the day — strangely 
cold for the latitude of Athens. The fierce sun 
scorches up the valleys of the San Joaquin and the 
Sacramento in the early morning; and the heated air, 
rising from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled 
by the cold breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa 
Range is unbroken but by the single gap of the Golden 
Gate, and through this opening the cold winds rush in 
a never-ceasing gale, spreading faulike as soon as they 
have passed the narrows. Hence it is that the Golden 
Gate is Ccilled ''The Keyhole," and the wind "The 
Keyhole Breeze." Up country they make it raise the 
water for irrigation. In winter there is a calm, and 
then the city is as sunn}^ as the rest of California. 

So purely local is the bitter gale that at Benicia, ten 
miles from San Francisco, the mean temperature is 
ten degrees higher for the year, and nearly twenty for 
the summer. I have stood on the shore at Benicia 
when the thermometer was at a hundred in the shade, 
and seen the clouds pouring in from the Pacific, and 
hiding San Francisco in a murky pall, while the tem- 
perature there was under seventy degrees. This fog 
retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San Fran- 



GOLDEN CITY. 213 

Cisco Bay. The entrance to the Golden Gate is nar- 
row, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake, 
Viscaino, sailed past it without seeing that there was 
a bay, and the great land-locked sea was first beheld 
by white men when the missionaries came upon its 
arms and creeks, far away inland. 

The peculiarity of climate carries with it great ad- 
vantages. It is never too hot, never tOa'lv'.ld, to work 
— a fact which of itself secures a grand fu^""-^ for San 
Francisco. The effect upon national type iS 'marked. 
At a San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not 
American. Even the lean Western men. and hungry 
Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the 
winds. The high metallic ring of the IsTew England 
voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, 
California must have been that fabled province of 
Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever 
a man's age when he entered it, he never grew older 
by a day. To dogs and strangers there are drawbacks 
in the absence of winter: dogs are muzzled all the 
year round, and musquitoes are perennial upon the 
coast. 

The city is gay with flags; every house'' "supports a 
liberty pole upon its roof, for when the Union senti- 
ment sprang up in San Francisco, at the beginning 
of the war, public opinion forced the citizens to make 
a conspicuous exhibition of the stars and stripes, by 
wa}^ of showing that it was from no want of loyalty 
that they refused to permit the circulation of the Fed- 
eral greenbacks. In this matter of flags the sea-gale 
is of service, for were it not for its friendly assistance, 
a short house between two tall ones could not sport a 
huge flag with much eflect. As it is, the w^ind always 
blowing across the chief streets, and never up or down, 
the narrowest and lowest house can flaunt a lar^re 



214 GREATER BRITAIN. 

• 
ensign without fear of its ever flapping against the 
walls of its proud neighbors. 

It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Californian 
English have the old-world type. With less ingenuity 
than the New England Yankees, they have far more 
depth and solidity in their enterprise; they do not 
rack their brai«n at inventing machines to peel apples 
and milk cows, but they intend to tunnel through the 
mountains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with its waters 
irrigate the Californian plains. They share our British 
love for cash payments and good roads; they one and 
all set their faces against repudiation in any shape, and 
are strongly for what they call "rolling-up" the debt. 
Throughout the war they quoted paper as depreciated, 
not gold as risen. Indeed, there is here the same un- 
reasoning prejudice against paper money that I met 
with in Nevada. After all, what can be expected of a 
State which still produces three-eighths of all the gold 
raised yearly in the world ? 

San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities 
bid fair to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands 
beneath the sun. New Englanders and Englishmen 
predominate in energy, Chinese in numbers. The 
French and Italians are stronger here than in any other 
city in the States; and the red-skinned Mexicans, who 
own the land, supply the market people and a small 
portion of the townsfolk. Australians, Polynesians, 
and Chilians are numerous; the Germans and Scan- 
dinavians alone are few; they prefer to go where they 
have already friends — to Philadelphia or Milwaukee. 
In this city — already a microcosm of the world — the 
English, British, and American are in possession — 
have distanced the Irish, beaten down the Chinese by 
force, and are destined to physically preponderate in 
the cross-breed, and give the tone, political and moral, 



GOLDEN CITY. 215 

• 

to the Pacific shore. iN'ew York is Irish, Philadelphia 
German, Milwaukee Norwegian, Chicago Canadian, 
Sault de Ste Marie French; but in San Francisco — 
where all the foreign races are strong — none is domi- 
nant; whence the singular result that California, the 
most mixed in population, is also the most English of 
the States. 

In this strange community, starting more free from 
the Puritan influence of New England than has hitherto 
done any State within the Union, it is doubtful what 
religion will predominate. Catholicism is "not fash- 
ionable" in America — it is the creed of the Irish, and 
that is enough for most Americans; so Anglicanism, 
its critics say, is popular as being " very proper." 
Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is flour- 
ishing in California, and it seems probable that the 
church which gains the day in California will event- 
ually be that of the whole Pacific. 

On Montgomery Street are some of the finest build- 
ings in all America; the " Occidental Hotel," the "Ma- 
sonic Hall," the "Union Club," and others. The club 
has only just been rebuilt after its destruction by a 
nitro-glycerin explosion which occurred in the express 
office next door. A case, of which no one knew the 
contents, was being lifted by two clerks, when it ex- 
ploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and break- 
ing half the windows in the city. On examination it 
was found to be nitro-glycerin on its way to the mines. 

Another accident occurred here yesterday with this 
same compound. A sharp report was heard on board 
a ship lying in the docks, and the cook was found 
dead, below; pieces of a flask had been driven into his 
heart and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was 
examined, and found to be common oil ; but this morn- 
ing, I read in the Alta a report from a chemist that 



216 GREATER BRITAIN. 

traces of nitro-glycerin have been discovered by him 
upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands 
says that the ship on her way up had called at Manza- 
nilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a mer- 
chant's office, emptied it of its contents, the character 
of which was unknown to him, and tilled it with com- 
mon vegetable oil. 

Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerin 
has been the nightmare of Californians. For earth- 
quakes they care little, but the freaks of the devilish 
oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in the Nevada 
mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself 
a demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and 
then the slightest friction will explode it — that, on the 
other hand, it goes off if heated. If you leave it stand- 
ing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are that it un- 
dergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it 
explodes ; and no lapse of time has on its power the 
smallest deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the 
oil will crystallize, and then its strength for harm is 
multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed 
by earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found 
to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerin. 

A day or two after my return from Benicia, I escaped 
from the city, and again went south, halting at San 
Jose, " The Garden Cit}' ," and chief town of the fer- 
tile Guadalupe district, on my way to the quicksilver 
mines of I^ew Almaden, now the greatest in the world 
since they have beaten the Spanish mines and Idria. 
From San Josd, I drove myself to Almaden along a 
sun-dried valley with a fertile tawny soil, reaching the 
delicious mountain stream and the groves it feeds in 
time to join my friends at lunch in the shady hacienda. 
The director took me through the refining works, in 
w^hich the quicksilver may be seen running in streams 



GOLDEN CITY. 217 

down gutters from the furnaces, but he was unable to 
go with me up the mountain to the mines from which 
the cinnabar comes shooting down by its weight. The 
superintendent engineer — a meerschaum-equipped Ba- 
varian — and myself mounted, at the Hacienda Gate, 
upon our savage-looking beasts, and I found myself 
for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican sad- 
dle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups that I 
had seen used by the Utes in Denver. The riding feats 
of the Mexicans and the Californian boys are explained 
when you find that their saddle puts it out of the ques- 
tion that they should be thrown ; but the fatigue that 
its size and shape cause to man and horse, when the 
man is a stranger to New Spain, and the horse knows 
that he is so, outweighs any possible advantages that 
it may possess. With their huge gilt spurs, attached 
to the stirrup, not to the boot, the double peak, and 
the embroidered trappings, the Mexican saddles are 
the perfection at once of the cumbersome and the 
picturesque. 

Silently we half scrambled, half rode, up a break-neck 
path which forms a short cut to the mine, till all at 
once a charge of our horses at an almost perpendicular 
wall of rock was followed b}^ their simultaneously com- 
mencing to kick and back toward the cliff. Spring- 
ing off, we found that the girths had been slackened 
by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit of mount- 
ain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the 
ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners 
and mining in French, my German not being much 
worse than my Bavarian's English. 

After viewing the mines, the walls of which, com- 
posed of crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torch- 
glare, we worked our way through the tunnels to the 
topmost lode and open air. 

19 



218 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Bidding good-by to what I could see of my Gennan 
in the fog from his meerschaum, I turned to ride down 
by the road instead of the path. I had not gone a 
furlong, when, turning a corner, there burst upon me 
a view of the whole valley of tawny California, now 
richly golden in the colors of the fall. Looking from 
this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the Contra 
<Josta Range before me, and Mount Plamilton tower- 
ing from the plain, apart, I could discern below me 
the gleam of the Coyote Creek, and of the windows in 
the church of Santa Clara — in the distance, the mount- 
ains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo 
to Alameda and San Pablo, basking in unhindered 
sun. The wild oats dried by the heat made of the 
plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups 
of black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain 
foot with " chapparal." The volcanic hills were rounded 
into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature over- 
spread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the 
mighty fog was beginning to pour in through the 
Golden Gate to refresh America with dews from the 
Pacific. 



CHAPTEE XXIII. 

LITTLE CHINA. 



"The Indians begin to be troublesome again in 
Trinity County. One man and a Chinaman have been 
killed, and a lady crippled for life." 

That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the 
English to colored races was not less strong in Cali- 



LITTLE CHINA. 219 

fornia than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was 
hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between 
men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the 
Alta Calif omian of the day of ray return to San Francisco. 

A determination to explore Little China, as the 
celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived 
at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humor 
of the Alta, and I at once set oiF in search of two of 
the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had 
some sort of introduction, and put myself under their 
charge for the night. 

We had not been half an hour in the Chinese theater 
or opera house before my detectives must have re- 
pented of their oiFer to "show me around," for, incom- 
prehensible as it must have seemed to them with their 
Kew England gravity and American contempt for the 
Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the per- 
formance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh 
that I had enjoyed since I had lelt the plantations ot 
Virginia. 

When we entered the house, which is the size of the 
Strand Theater of London, it may have been ten or 
eleven o'clock. The performance had begun at seven, 
and was likely to last till two a.m. By the *' perform- 
ance" was meant this particular act or scene, for the 
piece had been going on every evening for a month, 
and would be still in progress during the best part of 
another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama 
to take up the hero at an early age, and conduct him 
to the grave, which he reaches full of years and of 
honor. 

The house was crammed with a grinning crowd of 
happy "yellow boys," while the "China ladies" had a 
long gallery to themselves. ^N'o sound of applause is 
to be heard in a Chinese place of amusement, but the 



220 GREATER BRITAIN. 

crowd grin delight at the actors, who, for their part, 
grin back at the crowd. 

The feature of the performance which struck me at 
once w^as the hearty interest the actors took in the 
play, and the chaif that went on between them and 
the pit; it is not only from their numbers and the 
nature of their trades that the Chinese may be called 
the Irish of the Pacific : there was soul in every ges- 
ture. 

On the stage, behind the actors, was a band, which 
played unceasingly, and so loud that the performers, 
who clearly had not the smallest intention of subordi- 
nating their parts to the music, had to talk in shrieks 
in order to be heard. The audience, too, all talked in 
their loudest natural tones. 

As for the play, a lady made love to an old gentle- 
man (probably the hero, as this was the second month 
or third act of the play), and, bawling at him fiercely, 
was indignantly rejected by him in a piercing shriek. 
Relatives, male and female, coming with many howls 
to the assistance of the lady, were ignominiously put 
to flight, in a high falsetto kc}^, by the old fellow's 
footmen, who were in turn routed by a force of yelling 
spearmen, apparently the county posse. The soldiers 
wore paint in rings of various colors, put on so deftly, 
that of nose, of eyes, of mouth, no trace could be dis- 
covered; the front face resembled a tars^et for archerv. 
All this time, a steady, unceasing uproar was continued 
by four gongs and a harp, with various cymbals, pavil- 
ions, triangles, and guitars. 

Scenery there was none, but boards were put up in 
the Elizabethan way, wath hierogl vphics denoting the 
supposed locality ; and another archaic point is, that 
all the female parts were played by boys. For this I 
have the words of the detectives ; my eyes, had I not 



LITTLE CHINA. 221 

long since ceased to believe them, would have given 
me proof to the contrary. 

The acting, as far as I could judge by the grimace, 
"was excellent. ISTowhere could be found greater 
spirit, or equal power of facial expression. The stage 
fight was full of pantomimic force; the leading soldier 
would make his fortune as a London pantaloon. 

When the detectives could no longer contain their 
distaste for the performance, we changed our quarters 
for a restaurant — the "Hang Heong," the wood of 
which was brought from China. 

The street along which we had to pass was decorated 
rather than lit by paper lanterns hung over every door; 
but the "Hang Heong" was brilliantly illuminated, 
with a view, no doubt, to attracting the crowd as they 
poured out from the theater at a later hour. The 
ground-floor was occupied by shop and kitchen, the 
dining-rooms being up stairs. The counter, which 
is on the plan of that in the houses of the Palais 
Royal, was presided over, not by a smiling woman, 
but by grave and pig-tailed gentlemen in black, who 
received our order from the detective with the decor- 
ous solemnity of the head waiter in an English country 
inn. 

The rooms up stairs were nearly full; and as the 
Chinese by no means follow the Americans in silent 
eating, the babel was tremendous. A saucer and a 
pair of chopsticks were given each of us, but at our 
request a spoon was furnished as a special favor to the 
"Melicans." 

Tiny cups of a sweet spirit were handed us before 
supper was brought up. The liquor was a kind of 
shrub, but white, made, I was told, from sugar-canes. 
For first course, we had roast duck cut in pieces, and 
served in an oil-filled bowl, and some sort of fish ; tea 

19* 



222 GBEATER BRITAJN. 

was then brought in, and followed by shark's fin, for 
which I had given a special order; the result might 
have been gum arabic for any flavor I could find. Dog 
was not to be obtained, and birds'-nest soup was be- 
yond the purse of a traveler seven thousand miles 
from home, and twelve thousand from his next sup- 
plies. A dish of some strange, black fungus stewed 
in rice, followed by preserves and cakes, concluded 
our supper, and were washed down by our third cups 
of tea. 

After paying our respects and our money to the 
gentleman in black, who grunted a lugubrious some- 
thing that answered to "good night," we paid a yisit 
to the Chinese "bad quarter," which differs only in 
degree of badness from the "quartier Mexicain,'* the 
bad pre-eminence being ascribed, even b}^ the preju- 
diced detectives, to the Spaniards and Chilenos. 

Hurrying on, we reached the Chinese gaming-houses 
just before they closed. Some difficulty was made 
about admitting us by the "yellow loafers" who hung 
around the gate, as the houses are prohibited by law; 
but as soon as the ^detectives, who were known, ex- 
plained that they came not on business, but on pleasure, 
we were suftered to pass in among the silent, melan- 
choly gamblers. Not a word was heard, beyond every 
now and then a grunt from the croupier. Each man 
knew what he was about, and won or lost his money 
in the stillness of a dead-house. The game appeared 
to be a sort of loto ; but a few minutes of it was enough, 
and the detectives pretended to no deep acquaintance 
wdth its principles. 

The San Francisco Chinese are not all mere theater- 
goers, loafers, gamblers; as a body they are frugal, 
industrious, contented men. I soon grew to think it 
a pleasure to meet a Chinese-American, so clean and 



LITTLE CHINA. 223 

happy is his look : not a speck is to be seen upon the 
blue cloth of his long coat or baggy trowsers. His 
hair is combed with care; the bamboo on which he 
and his mate together carry their enormous load seems 
ab though cleansed a dozen times a day. 

It is said to be a peculiarity of the Chinese that they 
are all alike: no European can, without he has deal- 
ings with them, distinguish one Celestial from another. 
The same, however, may be said of the Sikhs, the 
Australian natives, of most colored races, in short. 
The points of difiereuce which distinguish the yellow 
men, the red men, the black men with straight hair, 
the negroes, from any other race whatever, are so much 
more prominent than the minor distinctions between 
Ah Sing and Chi Long, or between Uncle Ned and 
Uncle Tom, tbat the individual are sunk and lost in 
the national distinctions. To the Chinese in turn all 
Europeans are alike; but beneath these obvious facts 
there lies a grain of solid truth that is w^orth the hunt- 
ing out, and which is connected with the change-of- 
type question in America and Australasia. Men of 
similar habits of mind and body are alike among our- 
selves in Europe; noted instances are the close resem- 
blance of Pere Enfantin, the St. Simonian chief, to the 
busts of Epicurus; of Bismarck to Cardinal Ximenes. 
Irish laborers — men who for the most part work hard, 
feed little, and leave their minds entirely unplowed — 
are all alike ; Chinamen, who all work hard, and work 
alike, who live alike, and who go further, and all think 
alike, are, by a mere law of nature, indistinguishable 
one from the other. 

In the course of my wanderings in the Golden City, 
I lighted on the house of the Canton Company, one of 
the Chinese benevolent societies, the others being those 
of Hong Kong, Macao, and Amoy. They are like the 



224 GREATER BRITAIN. 

New York Immigration Commission, and the London 
"Societi^Frangaise deBienfaisance," combined; added 
to atheater and joss-house, or temple, and governed on 
the principles of such clubs as those of the " whites " 
or "greens " at Heidelberg, they are, in short, Chinese 
trades unions, sheltering the sick, succoring the dis- 
tressed, finding work for the . unemployed, receiving 
the immigrants from China when they land, and ship- 
ping their bones back to China, ticketed with name 
and address, when they die. " Hong Kong, with dead 
Chinamen," is said to be a common answer from out- 
ward-bounders to a hail from the guard-ship at the 
Golden Gate. 

Some of the Chinese are wealthy: Tung Yu & Co., 
Chi Sing Tong & Co., Wing Wo Lang & Co., Chy 
Lung & Co., stand high among the merchants of the 
Golden City. Honest and wealthy as these men are 
allowed to be, they are despised by every white Cali- 
fornian, from the governor of the State to the Mexican 
boy who cleans his shoes. 

In America, as in Australia, there is a violent preju- 
dice against John Chinaman. He pilfers, we are told; 
he lies, he is dirty, he smokes opium, is full of bestial 
vices — a pagan, and — what is far more important — 
yellow! All his sins are to be pardoned but the last. 
Californians, when in good humor, will admit that John 
is sober, patient, peaceable, and hard working, that his 
clothes at least are scrupulously clean; but he is yellow ! 
Even the Mexicans, themselves despised, look down 
upon the Chinamen, just as the I^ew York Irish affect 
to have no dealings with " the naygurs.'' The Chinese 
themselves pander to the feeling. Their famous ap- 
peal to the Californian Democrats may or may not be 
true: "What for Democlat allee timee talkee dam 
Chinaman ? Chinaman allee samee Democlat; no likee 



LITTLE CHINA. 225 

nigger, no likee injun." " Infernals," " Celestials," and 
" Greasers" — or black men, yellow men, and Mexicans 
— it is hard to say which are most despised by the 
American whites in California. 

The Chinaman is hated by the rough fellows for his 
cowardice. Had the Chinese stood to their rights 
against the Americans, they woald long since have 
been driven from California. As it is, here and in 
Victoria they invariably give way, and never work at 
diggings which are occupied by whites. Yet in both 
countries they take out mining licenses from the State, 
which is bound to protect them in the possession of the 
rights thus gained, but which is powerless against the 
rioters of Ballarat, or the "Anti-Chinese mob " of El 
Dorado. 

The Chinese in California are practically confined by 
public opinion, violence, or threats, to inferior kinds ot 
work, which the " meanest" of the whites of the Pa- 
cific States refuse to perform. Politically, this is slav- 
ery. All the evils to which slavery has given rise in 
the cotton States are produced here by violence, in a 
less degree only because the Chinese are fewer than 
were the negroes. 

In spite of a prejudice which recalls the time when 
the British government forbade the American colo- 
nist to employ negroes in the manufacture of hats, 
on the ground that white laborers could not stand the 
competition, the yellow men continue to flock to the 
"Gold Hills," as they call San Francisco. Already 
they are the washermen, sweepers, and porters of 
three States, two Territories, and British Columbia. 
They are denied civil rights; their word is not taken 
in cases where white men are concerned; a heavy tax 
is set upon them on their entry to the State; a second 
tax when they commence to mine — still their numbers 



226 GREATER BRITAIN. 

steadily increase. In 1852, Governor Bigler, in his 
message, recommended the prohibition of the immi- 
gration of the Chinese, but they now number one- 
tenth of the population. 

The Irish of Asia, the Chinese have commenced to 
flow over on to the outer world. Who shall say where 
the flood will stop ? Ireland, with now five millions 
of people, has, in twenty 3^ears, poured an equal num- 
ber out into the world. What is to prevent the next 
fifty years seeing an emigration of a couple of hundreds 
of millions from the rebellion>torn provinces of Cathay? 

Three Chinamen in a temperate climate will do as 
much arm-v\^ork as two Englishmen, and will eat or 
cost less. It looks as though the cheaper would starve 
out the dearer race, as rabbits drive out stronger but 
hungrier hares. This tendency is already plainly visi- 
ble in our mercantile marine: the ships are manned 
with motley crews of Bombay lascars, Maories, ISTe- 
groes, Arabs, Chinamen, Kroomen, and Malays. There 
are no British or American seamen now, except boys 
who are to be quartermasters some day, and experi- 
enced hands who are quartermasters already. But 
there is nothino^ to res^ret in this: Ano^lo-Saxons are 
too valuable to be used as ordinary seamen where las- 
cars will do nearly, and Maories quite as well. Nature 
seems to intend the English for a race of ofiicers, to 
direct and guide the cheap labor of the Eastern peo- 
ples. 

The serious side of the Chinese problem— just 
touched on here — will force itself rudely upon our 
notice in Australia. 




THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY.— P. 228 



CALIFORNIA. 227 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

CALIFORNIA. 

"In front of San Francisco are 745 millions of hungry 
Asiatics, who have spices to exchange for meat and 

grain." 

The words are Governor Gilpin's, made use of by 
him in discussing the future of overland trade, and 
worthy of notice as showing why it is that, in making 
forecasts of the future of California, we have to look 
more to her facilities for trade than to her natural pro- 
ductions. San Francisco aims at being, not so much 
the port of California as one of the main stations on 
the Anglo-Saxon highway round the globe. 

Althou^'-h the chief claim of California to consider- 
ation is her position on the Pacific, her fertility and 
size alone entitle her to notice. This single State is 
750 miles in length— would stretch from Chamouni to 
the southernmost point of Malta. There are two capes 
in California — one nearly in the latitude of Jerusalem, 
the other nearly in the latitude of Ptome. The State 
has twice the area of Great Britain; the single valley 
of the Joaquin and Sacramento, from Tulare Lake to 
the great snow-peak of Shasta, is as large as the three 
kino-doms. Every useful mineral, every kind of fertile 
soil every variety of helpful climate, are to be found 
within the State. There are in the Union forty-five 
such States or Territories, with an average area equal 
to that of Britain. 

Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are 



228 GREATER BRITAIN. 

three great tracts, each with its soil and character. 
On the slopes of the Sierra are the forests of giant 
timber, the sheltered valleys, and the gold fields in 
which I spent my lirst week in California. Next comes 
the great hot plain of Sacramento, where, with irriga- 
tion, all the best fruits of the tropics grow luxuriantly, 
where water for irrigation is plentiful, and the Pacific 
breeze will raise it. Round the valley are vast tracts 
for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are 
millions of acres of wild oats growing on the best of 
lands for cattle, while the slopes are covered with 
young vines. Between the Contra Costa Ixauge and 
the sea is a winterless strip, possessing for table vege- 
tables and flowers the finest soil and climate in the 
world. The story goes that Californian boys, when 
asked if they believe in a future state, reply: "Guess 
so; California." * 

Whether San Francisco will grow to be a second 
Liverpool or ITew York is an all-absorbing question to 
those who live on the Pacific shores, and one not with- 
out an interest and a moral for ourselves. !N'ew York 
has waxed rich and huge mainly because she is so 
placed as to command one of the best harbors on the 
coast of a country which exports enormously of bread- 
stuffs. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping 
ports for the manufactures of the northern coal counties 
of England. San Francisco Bay, as the best harbor 
south of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the center 
of the export trade of the Pacific States in wool and 
cereals. If coal is found in plenty in the Golden State, 
population will increase, manufactures spiing up, and 
the export of wrought articles take the place of that of 
raw produce. If coal is found in the Contra Costa 
Range, San Francisco will continue, in spite of earth- 
quakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side; if, 




EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY.-P. 228. 



n 



CALIFOBNIA. 229 

as is more probable, the find of coal is confined to the 
Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the 
future of San Francisco, as the meeting point of the 
railways, and center of the import of manufactured 
goods, and of the export of the produce of an agricul- 
tural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must in- 
evitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the 
Pacific States will in time develop into one of the com- 
mercial capitals of the world is a wider and a harder 
question. That it will be the converging point of the 
Pacific railroads, both of Chicago and St. Louis, there 
can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade 
from China and Japan w^ill pass through it seems as 
clear; it is tbe extent of this trade that is in question. 
For the moment, land transit cannot compete on equal 
terms with water carriage; but assuming that, in the 
long run, this will cease to be tbe case, it will be the 
overland route across Russia, and not that through the 
United States, that will convey the silks and teas of 
China to Central and Western Europe. The very argu- 
ments of which the Californiau merchants make use 
to show that the delicate goods of China need land 
transport, go to prove that shipping and unshipping in 
the Pacific, and a repetition in the Atlantic of each 
process, cannot be good for them. The political im- 
portance to America of the Pacific railroads does not 
admit of overstatement; but the Russian or English 
Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win the 
day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English 
railway through Southern China, Upper India, the 
Persian coast, and the Euphrates is no longer now a 
dream. If Russian bureaucracy takes too long to move, 
trade will be diverted by the Gulf route; coarser goods 
and food will long continue to come by sea, but in no 

20 



230 GREATER BRITAIN. 

case can the City of San Francisco become a western 
outpost of Europe. 

The luster of the future of San Francisco is not 
dimmed by considerations such as these ; as the port of 
entry for tlie trade of America, with all the East, its 
wealth must become enormous ; and if, as is probable, 
Japan, New Zealand, and New South Wales become 
great manufacturing communities, San Francisco must 
needs in time take rank as a second, if not a greater, 
London. This, however, is the more distant future. 
"With cheaper labor than the Pacitic States and the 
British colonies possess, with a more settled govern- 
ment than Japan — Pennsylvania and Ohio, from the 
time that the Pacitic railroad is completed, will take, 
and for years will keep, the China trade. As for the 
colonies, the voyage from San Francisco to Australia 
is almost as long and difficult as' that from England, 
and there is every probability that Lancaster and Bel- 
gium will continue to supply the colonists with clothes 
and tools, until they themselves, possessed as they are 
of coal, become competent to make them. The mer- 
chants of San Francisco will be limited in the main to 
the trade with China and Japan. Li tliis direction the 
future has no bounds: through California and the 
Sandwich Islands, through Japan, fast becoming 
American, and China, the coast of which is already 
British, our race seems marching westward to univer- 
sal rule. The Russian empire itself, with all its passive 
strength, cannot stand against the English horde, ever 
pushing with burning energy toward the setting sun. 
Russia and England are said to be nearing each other 
upon the Indus ; but long before they can meet there, 
they will be face to face upon the Amoor. 

For a time, the flood may be diverted south or north : 
Mexico will doubtless, and British Columbia will pro- 



CALIFORNIA. 231 

bably, carry off a portion of the thousands who are 
pouring West from the bleak rocks of New Englaud. 
The Californian expedition of 1858 against Sonora and 
Lower California will be repeated with success, but the 
tide will be but momentarily stayed. 80 entirely are 
English countries now the motberlands of energy and 
adventure throughout the world, that no one who has 
watched wliat has happened in California, in British 
Columbia, and on the west coast of N"ew Zealand, can 
doubt that the discovery of placer gold fields on any 
coast or in any sea-girt country in the world, must now 
be followed by the speedy rise there of an English gov- 
ernment : were gold, for instance, found in surface dig- 
gings in Japan, Japan would be English in five years. 
We know enough of Chili, of the new Russian country 
on the Amoor, of Japan, to be aware that such dis- 
coveries are more than likely to occur. 

In the face of facts like these, men are to be found 
who ask whether a break-up of the Union is not still 
probable — whether the Pacific States are not likely to 
secede from the Atlantic ; some even contend for the 
general principle that ''America must go to pieces — 
she is to big." It is small powers, not great ones, that 
have become impossible: the unification of Germany 
is in this respect but the dawn of a new era. The great 
countries of to-day are smaller than were the smallest 
of a hundred years ago. Lewes was farther from Lon- 
don in 1700 than Edinburgh is now. New York and 
San Francisco will in 1870 be nearer to each other than 
Canton and Pekin. From the point of view of mere 
size, there is more likelihood of England entering the 
Union than of California seceding from it. 

The material interests of the Pacific States will al- 
w^ays lie in union. The West, sympathizing in the 
main w^ith the Southerners upon the slavery question, 



232 GREATEB BUI TAIN. 

threw hei'self into the war, and crushed them, because 
she saw the necessity of keeping her outlets under her 
own control. The same policy would hold good for 
the Pacilic States in the case of the continental rail- 
road. America, of all countries, alone shares the fu- 
ture of both Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her 
interests too well to allow such an advantage to be 
thrown away. Uncalculating rebellion of the Pacific 
States upon some sudden heat, is the only danger to bo 
apprehended, and such a rising could be put down with 
ease, owing to the manner in which these States are 
commanded from the sea. Throughout the late rebel- 
lion, the Federal navy, though officered almost entirely 
by Southerners, was loyal to the flag, and it would be 
so again. In these days, loyalty may be said to be 
peculiarly the sailor's passion : perhaps he loves his 
country because he sees so little of it. 

The single danger that looms in the more distant fu- 
ture is the eventual control of Congress by the Irish, 
while the English retain their hold on the Pacific shores. 
******* 
California is too British to be typically American : 
it Avould seem that nowhere in the United States have 
we found the true America or the real American. 
Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is only 
by lookinsr carefully at each eccentric and irres:ular 
America — at Irish New York, at Puritan 'New Eng- 
land, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering 
far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States — that we 
come to reject the anomalous features, and to find 
America in the points they possess in common. It is 
when the country is left that there rises in the mind 
an image that soars above all local prejudice — that of 
the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are 
imposing English institutions on the world. 



MEXICO. 233 



CHAPTER XXV. 

MEXICO. 

In company with a throng of men of all races, all 
tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer 
can alone collect, I came coasting southward under the 
cliffs of Lower California. Of the thousand passen- 
gers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the 
upper and hurricane decks, more than half were dig- 
gers returning with a ^'pile" to their homes in the At- 
lantic States. While we hung over the bulwarks 
watchina^ the bonitos and the whales, the dio^orers threw 
^'bolas" at the boobies that flew out to us from the 
blazing rocks, and brought them down screaming upon 
the decks. Threading our way through the reefs oflT 
the lovely Island of Margarita, whore the "Independ- 
ence" was lost with three hundred human beino;s, we 
lay-to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed hia Excellency 
Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower Cali- 
fornia, and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Caven- 
dish lay in wait for months for the "great Manilla 
ship" — the Acapulco galleon. 

When Gu'olamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific 
coast, he confused the turtle with the " crocodile," de- 
scribing the former under the latter's name; but at 
Manzanilla, the two may be seen lying almost side 
by side upon the sands. Separated from the blue 
waters of the harbor by a narrow strand there is a fes- 
tering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the 

20* 



234 GREATER BRITAIN. 

smaller alligators ; but a few yards off, upon tlie other 
slope, the townsfolk and the turtles they had brought 
down for sale to our ship's purser were lying, when I 
saw them, in a confused heap under an awning of sail- 
cloth nailed up to the palm-trees. Alligator, turtle, 
Mexican, it was hard to say which was the superior 
leing. A French corvette was in possession of the 
port — one of the last of the holding-places through 
which the remnants of the army of occupation were 
dribbling back to France. 

In the land-locked bay of Acapulco, one of the dozen 
"hottest places in the world," we found two French 
frigates, whose officers boarded us at once. They told 
us that they landed their marines every morning after 
breakfast, and re-embarked them before sunset; they 
could get nothing from the shore but water; the Mex- 
icans, under Alvarez, occupied the town at night, and 
carried off even the fruit. When I asked about sup- 
plies, the answer was sweeping: "Ah, mon Dieu, mon- 
sieur, cette ssacrrreeee canaille de Alvarez nous vole 
tout. I^Tous n'avons que de I'eau fraiche, et Alvarez 
va nous emporter la fontaine aussi quelque nuit Ce 
sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, ces M^chicanos." When 
they granted us leave to land, it was with the proviso 
that we should not blame them if we were shot at by 
the Mexicans as we went ashore, and by themselves as 
we came off again. Firing often takes place at night 
between Alvarez and the French, but with a total loss 
in many months of only two men killed. 

The day of my visit to Acapulco was the anniver- 
sary of the issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaine's 
famous order of the day, directing the instant execu- 
tion, as red-handed rebels, of Mexican prisoners taken 
by the French. It is a strange commentary upon the 
Marshal's circular that in a year from its issue the 



MEXICO. 235 

"Latin empire in America" should have had a term 
set to it by the President of the United States. In 
Canada, in India, in Egypt, in New Zealand, the Eng- 
lish have met the French abroad, and in this Mexican 
affair history does but repeat itself. There is nothing 
more singular to the Londoner than the contempt of 
the Americans for France. All Europe seems small 
when seen from the United States; but the opinion of 
Great Britain and the strength of Russia are still looked 
on with some respect: France alone completely van- 
ishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us, 
"What does the Emperor say?" no one cares in the 
least what I^apoleon does or thinks. In a Chicago 
paper Ihave seen a column of Washington news headed, 
" Seward orders Leivis ISTapoleon to leave Mexico right 
away ! Kap. lies badly to get out of the hx !" While 
the Americans are still, in a high degree, susceptible 
of affront from England, and would never, if they con- 
ceived themselves purposely insulted, stop to weigh 
the cost of war, toward France they only feel, as a 
Californian said to me, "Is it worth our while to set to 
work to whip her?" The effect of Gettysburg and 
Sadowa will be that, except Great Britain, Italy, and 
Spain, no nations will care much for the threats or 
praises of Imperial France. 

The true character of the struggle in Mexico has not 
been pointed out. It was not a mere conflict between 
the majority of the people and a minority supported 
by foreign aid, but an uprising of the Indians of the 
country against the whites of the chief town. The 
Spaniards of the capital were Maximilian's supporters, 
and upon them the Indians and Mestizos have visited 
their revenge for the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro. On 
the west coast there is to be seen no trace of Spanish 
blood: in dress, in language, in religion the people 



236 G BEATER BRITAIN. 

are Iberian ; in features, in idleness, and in ferocity, 
undoubtedly Red Indian. 

In the reports of the Argentine Confederation it is 
stated that the Caucasian blood comes to the front in 
the mixed race; a few hundred Spanish families in La 
Plata are said to have absorbed several hundred thou- 
sand Indians, without sufiering in their whiteness or 
other national characteristics. There is something of 
the frog that swallowed the ox in this ; and the theories 
of the Argentine officials, themselves of the mixed 
race, cannot outweigh the evidence of our own eyes in 
the seaport towns of Mexico. There at least it is the 
Spaniards, not the Indians, who have disappeared ; and 
the only mixture of blood that can be traced is that of 
E,ed Indian and negro in the fisher boys about the 
ports. They are lithe lads, with eyes full of art and 
lire. 

The Spaniards of Mexico have become Red Indians, 
as the Turks of Europe have become Albanians or 
Circassians. Where the conquering marries into the 
conquered race it ends by being absorbed, and the 
mixed breed graduallj^ becomes pure again in the type 
of the more numerous race. It would seem that the 
North American continent w^ill soon be divided be- 
tween the Saxon and the Aztec republics. 

In California I once met with a caricature in which 
Uncle Sam or Brother Jonathan is lying on his back 
upon Canada and the United States, with his head in 
Russian America, and his feet against a tumble-down 
fence, behiud which is Mexico. His knees are bent, 
and his position cramped. He says, "Guess I shall 
soon have to stretch my legs some!" There is not in 
the United States any strong feeling in favor of the 
annexation of the remainder of the continent, but then^ 
is a solemn determination that no foreign country shall 



MEXICO. 237 

m any way gain fresh footing or influence npon Amer- 
ican soil, and that monarchy shall not be established 
in Mexico or Canada. Further than this, there is a 
belief that, as the south central portions of the States 
become fully peopled up, population will pour over 
into the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora, 
and that the annexation of these and some other por- 
tions of Mexico to the United States cannot long be 
prevented. For such acquisitions of territory America 
would pay as she paid in the case of Texas, which she 
first conquered, and then bought at a fair price. 

In annexhig tne whole of Mexico, Protestant Ameri- 
cans would feel chat they were losing more than they 
could gain. In California and ]^ew Mexico, they have 
already to deal with a population of Mexican Catho- 
lics, and difficulties have arisen in the matter of the 
church lands. The Catholic vote is powerful not 
only in California and N^ew York, but in Maryland, 
in Louisiana, in Kansas, and even in Massachusetts. 
The sons of the Pilgrim Fathers would scarcely look 
with pleasure on the admission to the Union of ten 
millions of Mexican Catholics, and, on the other hand, 
the day-dreams of Leonard Calvert would not be re- 
alized in the triumph of such a Catholicism as theirs 
any more than in the success of that of the Philadel- 
phia Academy, or New York Tammany Hall. 

With the exception of the Irish, the great majority 
of Catholic emigrants avoid the United States, but the 
migration of European Catholics to South America is 
increasing year by year. Just as the Germans, the 
IS'orwegians, and the Irish flow toward the States, the 
French, the Spanish, and the Italians flock into La 
Plata, Chili, and Brazil. The European population 
of La Plata has already reached three hundred thou- 
sand, and is growing fast. The French ^' mission 'in 



238 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Mexico was the making of that great country a further 
field for the Latin immigration; and when the CaU- 
fornians marched to Juarez's help, it was to save Mexico 
to !N"orth America. 

In all history, nothing can be found more dignified 
than the action of America upon the Monroe doctrine. 
Since the principle was first laid down in words, in 
1823, the national behavior has been courteous, con- 
sistent, firm; and the language used now that America 
is all-powerful, is the same that her statesmen made 
use of during the rebellion in the hour of her most 
instant peril. It will be hard for political philosophers 
of the future to assert that a democratic republic can 
have no foreign policy. 

The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of 
beauties of a peculiar kind; the sea is always calm, 
and of a deep dull blue, with turtles lying basking on 
the surface, and flj^iug-fish skimming lightly over its 
expanse, while the. shores supply a fringe of bright 
yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to the rich 
green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand-bar 
there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle- 
covered hills is cut by gullies, through which we get 
glimpses of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and be- 
hind them the sharp volcanic peaks rise through and 
into cloud. Once in awhile, Colima, or other giant 
hill, towering above the rest in blue-black gloom, 
serves to show that the shores belong to s^me mightier 
continent than Calypso's isle. 



EEPUBLICAN OE DEMOCRAT. 239 



CHAPTER XXVI. 



REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 



Among our Califoniian passengers, we had many 
strong party men, and political conversation never 
flagged throughout the voyage. In every discussion 
it became more and more clear that the Democratic is 
the Constitutional, the Republican the Utilitarian 
party — rightly called "Radical," from its habit of 
going to the root of things, to see whether they are 
good or bad. Such, however, is the misfortune of 
America in the possession of a written Constitution, 
such the reverence paid to that document on account 
of the character of the men who penned it, that 
even the extremest radicals dare not admit in public 
that they aim at essential change, and the party loses, 
in consequence, a portion of the strength that attaches 
to outspoken honesty. 

The President's party at their convention — known 
as the "Wigwam " — which met while I was in Phila- 
delphia, maintained that the war had but restored the 
" Union as it was,'^ with State rights unimpaired. The 
Republicans say that they gave their blood, as they 
are ready again to shed it, for the " Union as it was 
not;^' for one nation, and not for thirty-six, or forty- 
tive. The Wigwam declared that the Washington 
gove nment had no constitutional right to deny rep- 
resentation in Congress to any State. The Republicans 
ask how, if this constitutional provision is to be ob- 
served, the government of the country is to be carried 



240 GEE ATE R BRITAIN. 

on. The Wigwam laid it down as a principle, that 
Congress has no power to interfere with the right pos- 
sessed by each State to prescribe qualilications for the 
elective franchise. The Radicals say that State sover- 
eignty should have vanished when slavery went down, 
and ask how the South is to be governed consistently 
with republicanism unless by negro sulfrage, and how 
this is to be maintained except by Federal control over 
the various States — by abolition, in short, of the old 
Union, and creation of a new. The more honest 
among the Republicans admit that for the position 
which they have taken up, they can find no warrant in 
the Constitution; that, according to the doctrine which 
the *' continental statesmen" and the authors of "The 
Federalist" would lay down, were they living, thirty- 
five of the States, even if they were unanimous, could 
have no right to tamper with the constitution of the 
thirty-sixth. The answer to all this can only be that, 
were the Constitution to be closely followed, the result 
would be the ruin of the land. 

The Republican party have been blamed because 
their theory and practice alike tend toward a consoli- 
dation of power, and a strengthening of the hands of 
the government at Washington. It is in this that lies 
their chief claim to support. Local government is an 
excellent thing; it is the greatest of the inventions of 
our inventive race, the chief security for continued 
freedom possessed by a people already free. This 
local government is consistent with a powerful execu- 
tive; between the village municipalit}^ and Congress, 
between the cabinet and the district council of select- 
men, there can be no conflict: it is State sovereigntj^, 
and the pernicious heresy of primary allegiance to the 
State, that have already proved as costly to the Repub- 
lic as the}'^ are dangerous to her future. 



REPUBLICAN OB DEMOCBAT. 241 

It has been said that America, under the Federal 
system, unites the freedom of the small State with the 
power of the great ; but though this is true, it is brought 
about, not through the federation of the States, but 
through that of the townships and districts. The latter 
are the true units to which the consistent Republican 
owes his secondary allegiance. It is, perhaps, only in 
the tiny Kew England States that Northern men care 
much about their commonwealth ; a citizen of Penn- 
sylvania or New York never talks of his State, unless 
to criticise its legislature. After all, where intelligence 
f^nd education are all but universal, where a spirit of 
freedom has struck its roots into the national heart of 
a great race, there can be no danger in centralization, 
lor the power that you strengthen is that of the whole 
people, and a nation can have nothing to fear from 
itself. 

In watching the measures of the Radicals, we must 
remember that they have still to guard their country 
against great dangers. The war did not last long 
enough to destroy anti-republicanism along with 
slavery. The social system of the Carohnas was up- 
set; but the political fabric built upon a slavery foun- 
dation in such "free" States as New York and Mary- 
land is scarcely shaken. 

If we look to the record of the Republican party with 
a view to making a forecast of its future conduct, we 
find that at the end of the war the party had before it 
the choice between military rule and negro rule for the 
South — between a government carried on through 
generals and provost-marshals, unknown to the Consti- 
tution and to the courts, and destined to prolong for 
ages the disruption of the Union and disquiet of the 
nation, and, on the other hand, a rule founded upon 
the principles of equity and self-government, dear to 

21 



242 GREATER BRITAIN, 

our race, and supported by local niajorities, not by foi 
eign bayonets. Although possessed of the whole mili 
tary power of the nation, the Republicans refuse to en- 
danger their country, and established a system intended 
to lead by gradual steps to equal suffrage in the South. 
The immediate interest of the party, as distinguished 
from that of the country at large, was the other way. 
The Republican majority of the presidential elections 
of 1860 and 1864 had been increased by the success of 
the Federal arms, borne mainly by the Republicans of 
New England and the West, in a war conducted to a 
triumphant issue under the leadership of Republican 
Congressmen and generals. The apparent magna- 
nimity of the admission of a portion of the rebels, 
warm-handed, to the poll, would still further have 
strengthened the Republicans in the Western and Bor- 
der States; and while the extreme wing would not 
have dared to desert the party, the moderate men 
would have been conciliated by the refusal of the fran- 
chise to the blacks. A foresight of the future of the 
nation happily prevailed over a more taking policy, 
and, to the honor of the Republican leaders, equal fran- 
chise was the result. 

The one great issue between the Radicals and the 
Democrats since the conclusion of the war is this : the 
'* Democracy" deny that the readmission to Congress 
of the representatives of the Southern States is a mat- 
ter of expediency at all ; to them they declare that it 
is a matter of right. There was a rebellion in certain 
States which temporarily prevented their sending rep- 
resentatives ; it is over, and their men must come. 
Either the Union is or is not dissolved ; the Radicals 
admit that it is not, that all their endeavors were to 
prevent the Union being destroyed by rebels, and that 
they succeeded in so doing. The States, as States, were 



REPUBLICAN OH DEMOCBAT. 243 

never in rebellion ; there was only a powerful rebel- 
lion localized in certain States. " If you admit, then," 
say the Democrats, " that the Union is not dissolved, 
how can you govern a number of States by major- 
generals?" Meanwhile the Radicals go on, not wast- 
ing their time in words, but passing through the House 
and over the President's veto the legislation necessary 
for the reconstruction of free government — with their 
illogical, but thoroughly English, good sense, avoiding 
all talk about constitutions that are obsolete, and laws 
that it is impossible to enforce, and pressing on steadily 
to the end that they have in view : equal rights for all 
men, free government as soon as may be. The one 
thing to regret is, that the Republicans have not the 
courage to appeal to the national exigencies merely, 
but that their leaders are forced by public opinion to 
keep up the sham of constitutionalism. I^o one in 
America seems to dream that there can be anything 
to alter in the "matchless Constitution," which was 
framed by a body of slaveowners filled with the nar- 
rowest aristocratic prejudices, for a country which has 
since abolished slavery, and become as democratic as 
any nation in the world. 

The system of presidential election and the constitu- 
tion of the Senate are matters to which the Republi- 
cans will turn their attention as soon as the country ia 
rested from the war. It is not impossible that a life- 
time may see the abolition of the Presidency proposed, 
and carried by the vote of the whole nation. If this 
be not done, the election will come to be made directly 
by the people, without the intervention of the electoral 
college. The Senate, as now constituted, rests upon 
the States, and that State rights are doomed no one 
can doubt who remembers that of the population of 
Hew York State less than half are native-born l!^ew 



244 GBEATEB BBITAIX. 

Yorkers. What concern can the cosmopolitan moiet}'" 
of her people have with the State rightsof New York? 
"When a system becomes purely artiticial, it is on the 
road to death: when State rights represented the various 
sovereign powers which the old States had allowed to 
sleep while they entered a federal union, State rights 
were historical ; but now that Congress by a single 
vote cuts and carves territories as large as all the old 
States put together, and founds new commonwealths 
In the wilderness, the doctrine is worn out. 

It is not likely that the Republicans will carry all 
before them without a check; but though one Con- 
servative reaction may follow another, although time 
after time the Democrats may return victorious from 
the fall elections, in the end Radicalism must inevit- 
ably win the day. A party which takes for its watch- 
word, "The national good," will always beat the Con- 
stitutionalists. 

Except during some great crisis, the questions which 
come most home at election times in a democratic 
country are minor points, in which the party not in 
power has always the advantage over the office-holders: 
it is on these petty matters that a cry of jobbery and 
corruption can be got up, and nothing in American 
politics is more taking than such a cry. *' We are a 
liberal people, sir," said a Californian to me, *'but 
among ourselves we don't care to see some men get 
more than their share of Uncle Sam's money. It 
doesn't go down at election time to say tliat the Demo- 
crats are spoiling the country; but it's a mighty strong 
plank that you've got if you prove that Hank Andrews 
has made a million of dollars by the last Congressional 
job. We say, * Smart boy. Hank Andrews:' but we 
generally vote for the other man." It is these vsmall 
questions, or *^ side issues," as they are termed, which 



hepublican or democrat. 245 

cause tlie position of parties to fluctuate frequently in 
certain States. 

The first reaction against the now triumphant Radi- 
cals will probably bo based upon the indignation ex- 
cited by the extension of Maine liquor laws throughout 
the whole of the States in which the New Englanders 
have the mastery. Prohibitive laws are not supported 
in America by the arguments with which all of us in 
Britain are familiar. The New England Uadicals con- 
cede that, so far as the effects of the use of alcohol are 
strictly personal, there is no ground for the interfer- 
ence of society. They go even further, and say that 
no ground for general and indiscriminate interference 
with the sale of liquor is to be found in the fact that 
drink maddens certain men, and causes them to com- 
mit crime. They are willing to admit that, were the 
evils confined to individuals, it would be their own 
affair; but they attempt to show that the use of alco- 
hol affects the condition, moral and physical, of the 
drinker's offspring, and that this is a matter so bound 
up with the general weal that public interference may 
be necessary. It is the belief of a majority of the 
thinkers of New England that the taint of alcoholic 
poison is hereditary; that the children of drunkards 
will furnish more than the ordinary proportion of great 
criminals; that the descendants of habitual tipplers 
will be found to lack vital force, and will fall into the 
ranks of pauperism and dependence: not only are the 
results of morbid appetites, they say, transmitted to 
the children, but the appetites themselves descend to 
the offspring with the blood. If this be true, the New 
England Radicals urge, the use of alcohol becomes a 
moral wrong, a crime even, of which the law might 
well take cognizance. 

We are often told that party organization has be- 

21* 



246 GREATER BRITAIN. 

come so dictatorial, so despotic, in America, that no 
one not chosen by the preliminary convention, no one, 
in short, whose name is not upon the party ticket, has 
any chance of election to an otiice. To those who 
reflect upon the matter, it would seem as though- this 
is but a consequence of the existence of party and of 
the system of local representation : in Eughmd itself 
the like abuse is not unknown. Where neither party 
possesses overwhelming strength, division is failure; 
and some knot or other of pushing men must be per- 
mitted to make the selection of a candidate, to which, 
when made, the party must adhere, or sutler a defeat. 
As to the composition of the nominating conventions, 
the grossest misstatements have been made to us in 
England, for we have been gravely assured that a na- 
tion which is admitted to present the greatest mass of 
education and intelligence with the smallest intermix- 
ture of ignorance and vice of which the world has 
knowledge, allows itself to be dictated to in the matter 
of the choice of its rulers by caucuses and conventions 
composed of the idlest and most worthless of its popu- 
lation. Bribery, we have been told, reigns supreme 
in these assemblies; the nation's interest is but a 
phrase; individual sefishness the true dictator of each 
choice ; the name of party is but a cloak for private 
ends, and the wire-pullers are equaled in rascality 
only by their nominees. 

It need hardly be shown that, were these stories 
true, a people so full of patriotic sentiment as that 
which lately furnished a million and a half of volun- 
teers for a national war, would without doubt be led 
to see its safety in the destruction of conventions and 
their wire-pullers — of party government itself, if neces- 
sary. It cannot be conceived that the American people 
would allow its institutions to be stultified and law 



REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 247 

itself insulted to secure the temporary triumph of this 
party or of that, on any mere question of the day. 

The secret of the power of caucus and convention 
is, general want of time on the part of the community. 
Your honest and shrewd Western farmer, not having 
himself the leisure to select his candidate, is fain to 
let caucus or convention choose for him. In practice, 
however, the evil is far from great : the partj^ caucus, 
for its own interest, w^ill, on the whole, select the fittest 
candidate available, and, in any case, dares not, except 
perhaps in ISTew York City, ^x its choice upon a man 
of known bad character. Even where party is most 
despotic, a serious mistake committed by one of the 
nominating conventions will seldom fall to lose its side 
so many votes as to secure a triumph for the opponents. 

King Caucus is a great monarch, however; it would 
be a mistake to despise him, and conventions are dear 
to the American people — at least it would seem so, to 
judge from their number. Since I have been in Amer- 
ica there have been sitting, besides doubtless a hundred 
others, the names of which I have not noticed, the 
Philadelphia " Copper Johnson Wigwam," or assembly 
of the Presidential party (of which the Eadicals say 
that it is but "the Copperhead organization with a 
fresh snout"), a dentists' convention, a phrenological 
convention, a pomological congress, a school-teachers' 
convention, a Fenian convention, an eight-hour con- 
vention, an insurance companies' convention, and a 
loyal soldiers' convention. One is tempted to think 
of the assemblies of '48 in Paris, and of the caricatures 
representing the young bloods of the Paris Jockey 
Club being addressed by their President as "Citoyens 
Yicomtes," whereas, when the cafe waiters met in their 
congress, it was *' Messieurs les Gar^ons-limonadiers." 

The pomological convention was an extremely jovial 



248 G BEATER BRITAIK. 

one, all the horticultarists being wbisky-growers them- 
selves, and having a proper wish to compare their 
own with their neiirhbors' "Bourbon" or ''oklRve." 
Caucuses (or cauci: which is it?) of this kind suggest 
a derivation of this name for what many consider a low 
American proceeding, from an equally low Latin word 
of similar sound and spelling. In spite of the phrase 
" a dry caucus" being not unknown in the temper- 
ance State of Maine, man}- might be inclined to think 
that caucuses, if not exactly vessels of grace, were de- 
cidedly "drinking vessels;'' but Americans tell you 
that the word is derived from the phrase a " caulker's 
meeting," caulkers being peculiarly given to noise. 

The cry against conventions is only a branch of that 
against "politicians," which is continually being raised 
by the adherents of the side which happens at the mo- 
ment to be the weaker, and which evidently helps to 
create the evils against -which its authors are protest- 
ing. It is now the New York Democrats who tell such 
stories as that of the Columbia District census-taker 
going to the Washington house of a wealthy Boston 
man to find out his religious tenets. The door was 
opened by a black boy, to whom the white man began : 
"What's your name?" "Sambo, sah, am my Chris- 
tian name." "Wall, Sambo, is your master a Chris- 
tian?" To which Sambo's indignant answer was: 
" !N^o, sah ! Mass member ob Congret>s, sah !" When 
the Democrats were in power, it was the Republicans 
of Boston and the Cambridge professors who threw out 
sly hints, and violent invectives too, against the whole 
tribe of "politicians." Such unreasoning outcries are 
to be met only by bare facts ; but were a jury of read- 
ers of the debates in Parliament and in Congress to 
be impaneled to decide whether political immorality 
were not more rife in England than in America, I 



BROTHERS. 249 

should, for my part, look forward with anxiety to the 
result. 

The organization of the Kepublican party is hugely 
powerful; it has its branches in every township and 
district in the Union ; but it is strong, not in the wiles 
of crafty plotters, not in the devices of unknown 
politicians, but in the hearts of the loyal people of 
the country. If there were nothing else to be said 
to Englishmen on the state of parties in America, it 
should be sufficient to point out that, while the *' De- 
mocracy" claim the Mozart faction of New York and 
the shoddy aristocracy, the pious ISTew En glanders and 
their sons in the Northwest are, by a vast majority, 
JRepublicans; and no "side issues" should be allowed 
to disguise the fact that the Democratic is the p)arty of 
New York, the Republican the jjarty of America. 



CHAPTER XXVIL 

BROTHERS. 

I HAD landed in America at the moment of what is 
known in Canada as " the great scare" — that is, the 
Fenian invasion at Fort Erie. Before going South, I 
had attended at New York a Fenian meeting held to 
protest against the conduct of the President and Mr. 
Seward, who, it was asserted, after deluding the Irish 
with promises of aid, had abandoned them, and even 
seized their supplies and arms. The chief speaker of 
the evening was Mr. Gibbons, of Philadelphia, " Vice- 
President of the Irish Republic," a grave and vener- 



250 GREATER BRITAIN. 

able man ; no rogue or seberaer, but an enthusiast aa 
evidently convinced of the justice as of the certainty of 
the ultimate triumph of the cause. 

At Chicago, I went to the monster meeting at which 
Speaker Colfax addressed the Brotherhood ; at Bufialo, 
1 was present at the ^^ armed picnic" which gave the 
Canadian government so much trouble. On Lake 
Michigan, I went on board a Fenian ship ; in New 
York, I had a conversation with an ex-rebel officer, a 
long-haired Georgian, who was wearing the Fenian 
uniform of green-and gold in the public streets. The 
conclusion to which I came was, that the Brotherhood 
has the support of ninety-nine hundredths of the Irish 
in the States. As we are dealing not with British, but 
"with English politics and life, this is rather a fact to be 
borne in mind than a text upon which to found a 
homily ; still, the nature of the Irish antipathy to 
Britain is worth a moment's consideration; and the 
probable effect of it upon the future of the race is a 
matter of the gravest import. 

The Fenians, according to a Chicago member of the 
Koberts' wing, seek to return to the ancient state of 
Ireland, of which we find the history in the Brehon 
laws — a communistic tenure of land (resembling, no 
doubt, that of the Don Cossacks), and a republic or 
elective kingship. Such are their objects; nothing 
else will in the least conciliate the Irish in America. 
No abolition of the Establishment, no reform of land- 
laws, no Parliament on College Green, nothing that 
England can grant while preserving the shadow of 
union, can dissolve the Fenian league. 

All this is true, and yet tiiere is another great Irish 
nation to which, if you turn, you find that conciliation 
may still avail us. The Irish in Ireland are not Fenians 
in the American sense : they hate us, perhaps, bii]; they 



BROTHERS, 251 

may be mollitied ; they are discontented, but they may 
be satisfied; customs and principles of law, the natural 
growth of the Irish mind and the Irish soil, can be 
recognized, and made the basis of legislation, without 
bringing about the disruption of the empire. 

The first Irish question that we shall have to set our- 
selves to understand is that of land. Permanent tenure 
is as natural to the Irish as freeholding to the English 
people. All that is needed of our statesmen is, that 
they recognize in legislation that which they cannot 
but admit in private talk — namely, that there may be 
essential differences between race and race. 

The results of legislation which proceeds upon this 
basis may follow very slowly upon the change of sys- 
tem, for there is at present no nucleus whatever for the 
feeling of amity which we would create. Even the 
alliance of the Irish politicians with the English Radi- 
cals is merely temporary; the Irish antipathy to the 
English does not distinguish between Conservative 
and Radical. Years of good government will be needed 
to create an alliance against which centuries of oppres- 
sion and wrong-doing protest. We may forget, but 
the Irish will hardly find themselves able to forget at 
present that, while w^e make New Zealand savages 
British citizens as well as subjects, protect them in the 
possession of their lands, and encourage them to vote 
at our polling-booths, and take their place as constables 
and ofificers of the law, our fathers "planted" Ireland, 
and declared it no felony to kill an Irishman on his 
mother-soil. 

In spite of their possession of much political power, 
and of the entire city government of several great 
towns, the Irish in America are neither physically nor 
morally well ofi[*. Whatever may be the case at some 
future day, they still find themselves politically in 



252 GBEATEB BUI T A IX. 

EiisrHi^h hands. The very hin£cnaa:e that thev are com- 
pollod to speak is hateful, even to men who know no 
other. With an impotent spite which would ho amus- 
ing wero it not very sad, a resohition was earned hy 
aoehimation through hoth houses of the Fenian con- 
gress, at Phihidelphia, this year, *'that the word *Eng- 
lish' he unanimously dropped, and that the words 
'American language' he nsed in the future." 

From the Oahinet, from Congress, from every office, 
high or low, not controlled hy the Fenian vote, the 
Irish are systematically excluded ; hut it cannot be 
American public opinion which has pi^3vented the 
Catholic Irish from rising a^s merchants and traders, 
^ven in New York. Yet, while there are Belfast names 
high np on the Atlantic side and in San Francisco, 
there are none from Cork, none from the southern 
counties. It would seem as though the true Irishman 
w-ants the perseverance to become a successful mer- 
chant, and thrives best at pure brain-work, or upon 
land. Three-fourths of the Irisli in America remain 
in towns, losing the attachment to the soil which is the 
strongest characteristic of the Irish in Ireland, and 
tinding no new home : disgusted at their exclusion in 
America from political life and power, it is these men 
who turn to Fenianism as tt relief. Through drink, 
through gambling, and the other vices of homeless, 
thriftless men, they are soon reduced to beggary; and, 
moral as thev are bv nature, the Irish are nevertheless 
supplying America with that which she never before 
possessed — a criminal and pauper class. Of ten thou- 
sand people sent to jail each year in Massachusetts, six 
thousand are Irish born ; in Chicago, out of the 3598 
convicts of last ;>'ear, only eighty-four were native born 
Americans. 

To t\\e Americans, Fenianism has many aspects. 



liROTIIEIiH. 253 

The greater number hate the Irish, but Bympathiz(j 
profoundly with Ireland. Many are ho dewirouH of 
Beeing republieaninrn prevail throu<^hout the worhl 
that they KHfjport the irisli republic in any way, ex- 
cept, indeed, by taking itH paper money, and look upon 
:tH erttabliHhment aH a lirHt Bte[» toward the erection of 
a free government that Hhall include England and Scot- 
land as well. Home think the FeniauH will burn the 
Oa[)itol and rob the bankn; Bome regard them with 
Batisfaction, or i\\it reverse, from the religiouB point of 
view. One of the latter kind of hK>kers-on Baid to me: 
"1 was glsid to Bce the Fenian movement, not that I 
winh success to the Brotherhood as against you Eng- 
liHh, but because I rejoice to see among Irishmen a 
powerful center of resistance to the Catholic Church. 
We, in this country, were being delivered over, bound 
hand and foot, to tlie Jvoman Church, and these Fenians, 
by tlieir power and their violence against the priests, 
liave divided the Irish camp and rescued us." The 
unfortunate Canadians, for their part, ask why they 
should be shot and robbed becauHC Britain maltreats 
the Irish; but we muBt not forget that the Fenian raid 
on Canada was an exact repetition, almost on the same 
ground, of the 8t. Alban's raid into the American ter- 
ritory during the rebellion. 

The Fenians would be as absolutely without strength 
in America as they are without credit were it not for 
the anti J'ritiBh traditions of the iJemocratic party, and 
the rankling of the Alabama question, or rather of the 
remembrance of our general conduct during the rebel- 
lion, in the hearts of the Republicans. It is impossi- 
ble to spend much time in New England without be- 
coming aware that the people of the six Northeastern 
BtatOB love us from the heart. Nothing but this can 
explain the character of their feeling toward us on 

22 



254 GREATER BRITAIN. 

these Alabama claims. That we should refuse au ai^ 
bitratiou upon the whole question is to them inexpli- 
cable, and they grieve with wondering sorrow at our 
perversity. 

It is not here that the legal question need be raised; 
for observers of the present position of the English 
race it is enough that there exists between Britain and 
America a bar to perfect friendship — a ground for fu- 
ture quarrel — upon which we refuse to allow an all- 
embracing arbitration. We allege that we are the 
best judges of a certain portion of the case, that our 
dignity would be compromised by arbitration upon 
these points ; but such dignity must always be com- 
promised by arbitration, for common friends are called 
in only when each party to the dispute has a case, in 
the justice of which his dignity is bound up. Arbitra- 
tion is resorted to as a means of avoiding wars ; and, 
dignity or no dignity, everything that can cause war is 
proper matter for arbitration. What even if some 
little dignity be lost by the affair, in addition to that 
which has been lost already? No such loss can be set 
against the frightful hurtfulness to the race and to the 
cause of freedom, of war between Britain and America. 

The question comes plainly enough to this point; we 
say we are right; America says we are wrong; they 
offer arbitration, which we refuse upon a point of eti- 
quette — tbr on that ground we decline to refer to arbi- 
tration a point which to America appears essential. It 
looks to the world as though we offer to submit to the 
umpire chosen those points only on which we are al- 
ready prepared to admit that we are in the wrong. 
America asks us to submit, as we should do in private 
life, the whole correspondence on which the quarrel 
stands. Even if we, better instructed in the precedents 
of international law than were the Americans, could 



BliOTHERH. 255 

not but be in the right, still, as we know that intelligent 
and able men in the United States think otherwise, and 
would i'ancy their cause the just one in a war which 
Tuight arisii upon the diHi<;ulty, nurely there is ground 
for arbitration. It would be to the eternal disgrace of 
civilization that we should set to work to cut our 
brothers' throats upon a point of etiquette; and, by 
declining on the ground of honor to discuss these 
claims, we are compromising that honor in the eyes of 
all the wc)rld. 

In democracies such as America or France, every 
citizen feels an insult to his couiitry as an insult to 
himself. The Alabama question is in the mouth or 
in the heart — which is worse — of every American 
who talks with an Englishman in England or America. 

All nations commit, at times, the error ot acting as 
though tliey think that every people on earth, except 
themselves, are unanimous in their policy. Neglecting 
the race distinctions and the class distinctions which 
in England are added to the universal essential diifer- 
ences of minds, the Americans are convinced tliat, 
during the late war, we thought as one man, and that, 
in this present matter of the Alabama claims, we stand 
out and act as a united people. 

A New Yorker with whom I stayed at Quebec — a 
shrewd but kindly fellow — was an odd instance of the 
American incapacity to understand the British nation, 
which almost equals our own inability to comprehend 
America. Kind and hospitable to me, as is any Amer- 
ican to every Englishman in all times and places, he 
detested British policy, and obstinately refused to see 
that there is an England larger than Downing Street, 
a nation outside Pall MaU. "England was with the 
rebels throughout the war." "Excuse me; our ruling 
classes were so, perhaps, but our rulers don't represent 



256 GREATER BRITAIN. 

■us any more than your 39th Congress represents George 
Washington." In America, where Congress does fairly 
represent the nation, and where there has never been 
less than a quarter of the body favorable to any policy 
which half the nation supported, men cannot under- 
stand that there should exist a country which thinks 
one way, hut, through her rulers, speaks another. We 
may disown the national policy, but we suffer for it. 

The hospitality to Englishmen of the American 
England-hater is extraordinary. An old Southerner 
in Richmond said to me in a breath, "I'd go and live 
in England if I didn't hate it as I do. England, sir, 
betrayed us in the most scoundrelly way — talked of 
sympathy with the South, and stood by to see us swal- 
lowed up. I hate England, sir ! Come and sta}^ a week 

with me at my place in County. Going South 

to-day? Well, then, you return this way next week. 
Come then ! Come on Saturday week." 

When we ask, *'Why do you press the Alabama 
claims against us, and not the Florida, the Georgia, 
and the Rappahannock claims against the French?" 
the answer is: "Because we don't care about the 
French, and what they do and think ; besides, we owe 
them some courtesy after bundling them out of Mexico 
in the way we did." In truth there is among Amer- 
icans an exaggerated estimate of the offensive powers 
of Great Britain ; and such is the jealousy of young 
nations that this exaggeration becomes of itself a cause 
of danger. Were the Americans as fully convinced, 
as we ourselves are, of our total incapacity to carry 
on a land war with the United States on the western 
side of the Atlantic, the bolder spirits among them 
would cease to feel themselves under an assumed 
necessity to show us our own weakness and their 
strength. 



BROTHEBS. 257 

The chief reason why America finds much to offend 
her in our conduct is, that she cares for the opinion of 
no other people than the English. America, before 
the terrible blow to her confidence and love that our 
conduct during the rebellion gave, used morally to 
lean on England. Happily for herself she is now 
emancipated from the mental thraldom; but she still 
yearns toward our kindly friendship. A Napoleonic 
Senator harangues, a French paper declaims, against 
America and Americans; who cares? But a Times' 
leader, or a speech in Parliament from a minister of 
the Crown, cuts to the heart, wounding terribly. A na- 
tion, like an individual, never quarrels with a stranger; 
there must be love at bottom for even querulousness 
to arise. While I was in Boston, one of the foremost 
writers of America said to me in conversation: "I 
have no son, but I had a nephew of my own name ; a 
grand fellow; young, handsome, winning in his ways, 
full of family affections, an ardent student. He felt it 
his duty to go to the front as a private in one of our 
regiments of Massachusetts volunteers, and was pro- 
moted for bravery to a captaincy. All of us here 
looked on hi«i as a 'New England Philip Sidney, the 
type of all that was manly, chivalrous, and noble. The 
very day that I received news of his being killed in 
leading his company against a regiment, I was forced 
by my duties here to read a leader in one of your chief 
papers upon the ofiicering of our army, in which it was 
more than hinted that our troops consisted of German 
cut-throats and pot-house Irish, led by sharpers and 
broken politicians. Can you wonder at my being 
bitter?" 

That there must be in America a profound feeling 
of affection for our country is shown by the avoidance 
of war when we recognized the rebels as belligerents ; 

22* 



258 OREATER BRITAIN. 

and, again, at the time of the Trent affair, when the 
surface cry was overwhelmingly for battle, and the 
cabinet only able to tide it over by promising the West 
war with England as soon as the rebellion was put 
down. " One war at a time, gentlemen," said Lincoln. 
The man who, of all in America, had most to lose by 
war with England, said to me of the Trent affair : "I 

was written to by C to do all I could for peace. I 

wrote him back that if our attorney-general decided 
that our seizure of the men was lawful, I would spend 
my last dollar in the cause." 

The Americans, everywhere affectionate toward the 
individual Englishman, make no secret of their feeling 
that the first advances toward a renewal of tbe national 
friendship ought to come from us. They might remind 
us that our Maori subjects have a proverb, " Let friends 
settle their disputes as friends." 



CHAPTER XXYIIL 

AMERICA. 

Wb are coasting again, gliding through calm blue 
waters, watching the dolphins as they play, and the 
boobies as they fly stroke and stroke w^ith the paddles 
of the ship. Mountains rise through the warm misty 
air, and form a long towering line upon the upper 
skies. Hanging high above us are the Volcano of Fire 
and that of Water — twin menacers of Guatamala City. 
In the sixteenth century, the water-mountain drowned 
it; in the eighteenth, it was burnt by the fire-hill. 



AMERICA. 259 

Since then, the city has been shaken to pieces by earth- 
quakes, and of sixty thodsancl men and women, hardly 
one escaped. Down the valley, between the peaks, we 
have through the mahogany groves an exquisite distant 
view toward the city. Once more passing on, we get 
peeps, now of West Honduras, and now of the island 
coffee plantations of Costa Kica. The heat is terrible. 
It was just here, if we are to believe Drake, that he 
fell in with a shower so hot and scalding, that each 
drop burnt its hole through his men's clothes as they 
hung up to dry. *' Steep stories," it is clear, were known 
before the plantation of America. 

ISTow that the time has come for a leave-taking of the 
continent, we can begin to reflect upon facts gleaned 
during visits to twenty-nine of the forty-iive Territories 
and States — twenty-nine empires the size of Spain. 

A man may see American countries, from the pine- 
wastes of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra; may talk 
with American men and women, from the sober citizens 
of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat of 
American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to 
clambakes on the shores near Salem ; and yet, from the 
time he first " smells the molasses" at Nantucket light- 
ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the 
Golden Gate, may have no idea of an American. You 
may have seen the East, the South, the West, the 
Pacific States, and yet have failed to find America. It 
is not till you have left her shores that her image grows 
up in the mind. 

The first thing that strikes the Englishman just 
landed in New York is the apparent Latinization of 
the English in America ; but before he leaves the 
country, he comes to see that this is at most a local 
fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigor 
of the English race — the defeat of the cheaper by the 



260 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs 
four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four 
pence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in 
America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, de- 
stroying the Red Indians, and checking the advance of 
the Chinese. 

The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on 
earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable 
destruction of the Eed Indians of Central !N"orth 
America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the 
Enoflish colonists, no numerous race had ever been 
blotted out by an invader. ' The Danes and Saxons 
amalsramated with the Britons, the Normans with the 
English, the Tartars with the Chinese, the Goths and 
Burgundians with the Gauls : the Spaniards not only 
never annihilated a people, but have themselves been 
all but completely expelled by the Indians, in Mexico 
and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the 
Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria, 
have conquered but not killed off* the native peoples. 
Hitherto it has been nature's rule, that the race that 
peopled a country in the earliest historic da^^s should 
people it to the end of time. The American problem 
is this: does the law, in a moditied shape, hold good, 
in spite of the destruction of the native population ? 
Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free, are 
commencing slowly to die out? that the New Eng- 
landers are dying fast, and their places being supplied 
by immigrants ? Can the English in America, in the 
long run, survive the common fate of all migrating 
races ? Is it true that, if the American settlers con- 
tinue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer 
English, but Red Indian ? It is certain that the Eng- 
lish families long in the land have the features of the 
extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroes 



AMERICA. 261 

there is at present no trace of any change, save in their 
becomini? dark brown instead of black. 

The Maories — an immigrant race — were dying off 
in ]N^cw Zealand when we landed there. The Indians 
of Mexico — another immigrant people — had themselves 
undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first 
became acquainted with them. Are- we English in 
turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great 
natural law forbidding change ? It is easy to say that 
the English in Old England are not a native but an im- 
migrant race; that they show no symptoms of decline. 
There, however, the change was slight, the distance 
short, the difference of climate small. 

The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type 
is equaled at least, if not exceeded, by that of the total 
alteration of the moral characteristics of the immigrant 
races — the entire destruction of eccentricity, in short. 
The change that conies over those among the Irish who 
do not remain in the great towns is not greater than 
that which overtakes the English handworkers, of 
whom some thousands reach America each year. 
Gradually settling down on land, and finding them- 
selves lost in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the 
inspiring obstacles of antiquated institutions and class 
prejudice, the English handicraftsman, ceasing to be 
roused to aggressive Iladicalism by the opposition of 
sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead 
settler, or adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even 
than this revolution of character is that which falls 
upon the Celt. JSTot only is it a fact known alike to 
physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish 
parents born in America are, physically, not Irish, 
Americans, but the like is true of the moral type: the 
change in this is at least as sweeping. The son of 
Eenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gaunt 



262 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

American, qiiickof thought, but slow of speech, whom 
we have begun to recognize as the latest product of the 
Saxon race, when housed upon the Western prairies, 
or in the pine-woods of l!^ew Enghxnd. 

For the moral change in the British workman it is 
not difficult to account: the man who will leave coun- 
try, home, and friends, to seek new fortunes in Amer- 
ica, is essentially not an ordinary man. As a rule, ho 
is above the average in intelligence, or, if defective in 
this point, he makes up for lack of wit by the posses- 
sion of concentrativeness and energy. Such a man 
will have pushed himself to the front in his club, his 
union, or his shop, before he emigrates. In England 
he is somebody; in America he finds all hands con- 
tented; or, if not this, at all events too busy to com- 
plain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among 
contented men, his equals both in intelligence and 
ambition, in a country of perfect freedom of speech, 
of manners, of laws, and of society, the occupation of 
his mind is gone, and he comes to think himself what 
others seem to think — a nobody; a man who no longer 
is a living force. He settles upon land; and when the 
world knows him no more, his children are happy 
corn-growers in his stead. 

The shape of E"orth America makes the existence 
of distinct peoples within her limits almost impossible. 
An upturned bowl, with a mountain rim, from which 
the streams run inward toward the center, she must 
fuse together all the races that settle within her borders, 
and the fusion must now be in an Eng-lish mould. 

There are homogeneous foreign populations in sev- 
eral portions of the United States; not only the Irish 
and Chinese, at whose prospects we have already 
glanced, but also Germans in Pennsylvania, Spanish 
in Florida, French in Louisiana and at Sault de Ste 



AMEBICA. 263 

Marie. In Wisconsin there is a ISTorwegian popula- 
tion of over a hundred thousand, retaining their own 
language and their own architecture, and presenting 
the appearance of a tough morsel for the English to 
digest; at the same time, the Swedes were the first 
settlers of Delaware and l:^ew Jersey, and there they 
have disappeared. 

Milwaukee is a Norwegian town. The houses are 
narrow and high, the windows many, with circular 
tops ornamented in w^ood or dark-brown stone, and a 
heavy wooden cornice crowns the front. The churches 
have the wooden bulb and spire which are character- 
istic of the Scandinavian public buildings. The Nor- 
wegians will not mix with other races, and invariably 
flock to spots where there is already a large population 
speaking their own tongue. Those who enter Canada 
generally become dissatisfied with the country, and 
pass on into Wisconsin, or Minnesota, but the Canadian 
government has now under its consideration a plan 
for founding a iTorwegian colony on Lake Huron. 
The numbers of this people are not so great as to make 
it important to inquire whether they will ever merge 
into the general population. Analogy would lead us 
to expect that they will be absorbed; their existence is 
not historical, like that of the French in Lower Canada. 

From Burlington, in Iowa, I had visited a spot the 
history of which is typical of the development of Amer- 
ica — JNTauvoo. Founded in 1840 by Joe Smith, the 
Mormon city stood upon a bluff overhanging the Des 
Moines rapids of the Mississippi, presenting on the 
land side the aspect of a gentle, graceful slope, sur- 
mounted by a plain. After the fanatical pioneers of 
English civilization had been driven from the city, and 
their temple burnt, there came Cabet's Icarian band, 
who tried to found a new France in the desert; but in 



261 GREATER BRITAIN. 

1856 the leader died, and his people dispersed them- 
selves about the States of Iowa and Missouri. Next 
came the English settlers, active, thriving, regardless 
of tradition, and Nauvoo is entering on a new life as 
the capital of a wine-growing country. I found Cabet 
and the Mormons alike forgotten. The ruins of the 
temple have disappeared, and the huge stones have 
been used up in cellars, built to contain the Hock — a 
pleasant wine, like Zeltinger. 

The bearing upon religion of the gradual dertruc- 
tion of race is of great moment to the world. Chris- 
tianity will gain by the change; but which of its many 
branches will receive support is a question which only 
admits of an imperfect answer. Arguing a 'priori^ we 
should expect to find that, on the one hand, a tendency 
toward unity would manifest itself, taking the shape, 
perhaps, of a gain of strength by the Catholic and 
Anglican Churches; on the other hand, there would 
be a contrary and still stronger tendency toward an 
infinite multiplication of beliefs, till millions of men 
and women would become each of them his own 
church. Coming to the actual cases in which we can 
trace the tendencies that commence to manifest them- 
selves, we find that in America the Anglican Church 
is gaining ground, especially on the Pacific side, and 
that the Catholics do not seem to meet with any such 
success as we should have looked for; retaining, in« 
deed, their hold over the Irish women and a portion 
of the men, and having their historic French branches 
in Louisiana and in Canada, but not, unless it be in 
the Cities of New York and Philadelphia, making 
much w^ay among the English. 

Between San Francisco and Chicago, for religious 
purposes the most cosmopolitan of cities, we have to 
draw distinctions. In the Pacific city the disturbing 



AMERICA. 265 

cau^e is the presence of IN'ew Yorkers ; in the metrop- 
olis of the Northwestern States it is the dominance of 
New England ideas : still, we shall find no two cities 
80 free from local color, and from the influence of race. 
The result of an examination is not encoura2:in2:: in 
both cities there is much external show in the shape 
of church attendance; in neither does religion strike 
its roots deeply into the hearts of the citizens, except 
so far as it is alien and imported. 

The Spiritualist and Unitarian churches are both of 
them in Chicago extremely strong: they support news- 
papers and periodicals of their own, and are led by men 
and women of remarkable ability, but they are not the 
less Cambridge Unitarianism, Boston Spiritualism; 
there is nothing of the Northwest about them. In San 
Francisco, on the other hand, Anglicanism is prosper- 
ing, but it is New York Episcopalian ism, sustained by 
immigrants and money from the East; in no sense is 
it a Californian church. 

Throughout America the multiplication of churches 
is rapid, but among the native-born Americans, Super- 
naturalism is advanci ng with great strides. The Shakers 
are strong in thought, the Spiritualists in wealth and 
numbers; Communism gains ground, but not Polyg- 
amy — the Mormon is a purely European church. 

There is just now progressing in America a great 
movement, headed by the " Radical Unitarians," 
toward "free religion," or church without creed. 
The leaders deny that there is sufficient security for 
the spread of religion in each man's individual action: 
they desire collective work by all free-thinkers and 
liberal religionists in the direction of truth and purity 
of life. Christianity is higher than dogma, we are 
told; there is no way out of infinite multiplication ol 
creeds but by their total extirpation. Oneness of pur- 

23 



266 GREATER BRITAIN, 

pose and a common love for truth form the members* 
only tie. Elder Frederick Evans said to me : " All 
truth forms part of Shakerism;" but these free relig- 
ionists assure us that in all truth consists their sole re- 
ligion. 

The distinctive feature of these American philo- 
sophical and religious systems is their gigantic width: 
for instance, every human being who admits that dis- 
embodied spirits may in any way hold intercourse with 
dwellers upon earth, whatever else he may believe or 
disbelieve, is claimed by the Spiritualists as a member 
of their church. They tell us that by " Spiritualism they 
understand whatever bears relation to spirit;" their 
system embraces all existence, brute, human, and 
divine; intact, ''the real man is a spirit." Accord- 
ing to these ardent proselytizers, every poet, every man 
with a grain of imagination in his nature, is a " Spirit- 
ualist." They claim Plato, Socrates, Milton, Shak- 
speare, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Luther, 
Joseph Addison, Melancthon, Paul, Stephen, the whole 
of the Hebrew prophets. Homer, and John Wesley, 
among the members of their Church. They have 
lately canonized new saints ; St. Confucius, St. Theo- 
dore (Parker), St. Ralph (Waldo Emerson), St. Emma 
(Hardinge), all figure in their calendar. It is a note- 
worthy fact that the saints are mostly resident in Kew 
England. 

The tracts published at the Spiritual Clarion office, 
Auburn, New York, put forward Spiritualism as a re- 
ligion wdiich is to stand toward existing churches as 
did Christianity toward Judaism, and announce a new 
dispensation to the peoples of the earth " who have 
sown their wild oats in Christianity," but they spell 
supersede with a "c." 

This strangre relisrion has long since left behind the 



AMEBIC A. 267 

Tappings and table-turnings in which it took its birth. 
The secret of its success is that it supplies to every man 
the satisfaction of the universal craving for the super- 
nal ural, in any form in which he will receive it. The 
Spiritualists claim two millions of active believers and 
^ve million *' favorers" in America. 

The presence of a large German population is thought 
by some to have an important bearing on the religious 
future of America, but the Germans have hitherto 
kept themselves apart from the intellectual progress of 
the nation. They, as a rule, withdraw from towns, 
and, retaining their language and supporting local 
papers of their own, live out of the world of American 
literature and politics; taking, however, at rare inter- 
vals, a patriotic part in national affairs, as was notably 
the case at the time of the late rebellion. Living thus 
by themselves, they have even less influence upon 
American religious thought than have the Irish, who, 
speaking the English tongue, and dwelling almost 
exclusively in towns, are brought more into contact 
with the daily life of the republic. The Germans in 
America are in the main pure materialists under a 
certain show of deism, but hitherto there has been no 
alliance between them and the powerful Chicago Radi- 
cal Unitarians, difference of language having thus far 
proved a bar to the formation of a league which would 
otherwise have been inevitable. 

On the whole, it would seem that for the moment 
religious prospects are not bright; the tendency is 
rather toward intense and unhealthily-developed feel- 
ing in the few, and subscription to some one of the 
Episcopalian churches — Catholic, Anglican, or Meth- 
odist — among the many, coupled with real indifference. 
Keither the tendency to unity of creeds nor that toward 
infinite multiplication of beliefs has yet made that 



268 GREATER BRITAIN. 

progress which abstract speculation would have led us 
to expect, but so far as we can judge from the few facts 
before us, there is much likelihood that multiplication 
will in the future prove too strong for unity. 

After all there is not in America a greater wonder 
than the Englishman himself, for it is to this continent 
that you must come to find him in full possession of 
his powers. Two hundred and fifty millions of people 
speak or are ruled by those who speak the English 
tongue, and inhabit a third of the habitable globe; 
but, at the present rate of increase, in sixty years there 
w^ill be two hundred and fifty millions of Englishmen 
dwelling in the United States alone. America has 
somewhat grown since the time when it was gravely 
proposed to call her Alleghania, after a chain of mount- 
ains which, looking from this western side, may be 
said to skirt her eastern border, and the loftiest peaks 
of which are but half the height of the very passes of 
the Rocky Mountains. 

America is becoming not English merely, but world- 
embracing in the variety of its type ; and, as the Eng- 
lish element has given language and history to that 
land, America ofiers the English race the moral direct- 
orship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon 
institutions and the English tongue. Through Amer- 
ica, England is speaking to the world. 



P^RT II. 

POLYNESIA. 



28* (269 



CHAPTER L 

PITCAIRN ISLAND. 

Panama is a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that 
rises abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decay- 
ing bastions and decayed cathedrals, while a dense 
jungle of mangrove and bamboo threatens to bury it in 
rich greenery. The forest is tilled with baboons and 
lizards of gigantic size, and is gay with the bright 
plumage of the toucans and macaws, while, within the 
walls, every housetop bears its living load of hideous 
turkey-buzzards, foul- winged and bloodshot-eyed. 

It was the rainy season (which here, indeed, lasts for 
three-quarters of the year), and each day was an alter- 
nation of shower-bath, and vapor-bath with sickly sun. 
On the first night of my stay, there was a lunar rain- 
bow, which I went on to the roof of the hotel to watch. 
The misty sky was white with the reflected light of the 
hidden moon, which was obscured by an inky cloud, 
that seemed a tunnel through the heavens. In a few 
minutes I was driven from my post by the tropical 

rain. 

At the railway station, I parted from my Californian 
friends, who were bound for Aspinwall, and thence by 
steamer to New York. A stranger scene it has not 
often been my fortune to behold. There cannot have 
been less than a thousand natives, wearing enormous 
hats and little else, and selling everything, from linen 
suits to the last French novel. A tame jaguar, a peli- 
can, parrots, monkeys, pearls, shells, flowers, green 

(271) 



272 GREATER BRITAIN. 

cocoa-nuts and turtles, mangoes and wild dogs, were 
among the things for sale. The station was guarded 
by the army of the Republic of New Granada, consist- 
ing of five oflacers, a bugler, a drummer, and nineteen 
privates. Six of the men wore red trowsers and dirty 
shirts for uniform ; the rest dressed as they pleased, 
which was generally in Adamic style. Not even the 
officers had shoes; and of the twenty-one men, one was 
a full-blooded Indian, some ten were negroes, and the 
remainder nondescripts, but among them was of course 
an Irishman from Cork or Kilkenny. After the train 
had started, the troops formed, and marched briskly 
through the town, the drummer trotting along some 
twenty yards before the company, French-fashion, and 
beating the retraite. The French invalids from Aca- 
pulco, who were awaiting in Panama the arrival of an 
Imperial frigate at Aspinwall, stood in the streets to 
see the New Granadans pass, twirling their moustaches, 
and smiling grimly. One old drum-major, lean and 
worn with fever, turned to me, and, shrugging his 
shoulders, pointed to his side : the Granadans had their 
bayonets tied on with string. 

Whether Panama will continue to hold its present 
position as the "gate of the Pacific" is somewhat 
doubtful : Nicaragua offers greater advantages to the 
English, Tehuantepec to the American traders. The 
Gulf of Panama and the ocean for a great distance to 
the westward from its mouth are notorious for their 
freedom from all breezes; the gulf lies, indeed, in the 
equatorial belt of calms, and sailing-vessels can never 
make much use of the port of Panama. Aspinwall or 
Colon, on the Atlantic side, has no true port whatever. 
As long, however, as the question is merely one of rail- 
road and steamship traffic, Panama may hold its own 
against the other isthmus cities ; but when the canal is 



PIT CAIRN ISLAND. 273 

cut, the selected spot must be one that shall be beyond 
the reach of calms — in l^icaragua or Mexico. 

From Panama I sailed in one of the ships of the 
new Colonial Line, for Wellington, in New Zealand — 
the longest steam-voyage in the world. Our course 
was to be a "great circle" to Pitcairn Island, and 
another great circle thence to Cape Palliser, near Wel- 
lington — a distance in all of some 6600 miles ; but our 
actual course was nearer 7000. When off the Gala- 
pagos Islands, we met the cold southerly wind and 
water, known as the Chilian current, and crossed the 
equator in a breeze which forced us all to wear great- 
coats, and to dream that, instead of entering the 
southern hemisphere, we had come by mistake within 
the arctic circle. 

After traversing lonely and hitherto unknown seas 
and looking in vain for a new guano island, on the 
sixteenth day we worked out the ship's position at 
noon with more than usual care, if that were possible, 
and found that in four hours we ought to be at Pit- 
cairn Island. At half-past two o'clock, land was 
sighted right ahead ; and by four o'clock, we were in 
the bay, such as it is, at Pitcairn. 

Although at sea there was a calm, the surf from the 
ground-swell beat heavily upon the shore, and we 
were faint to content ourselves with the view of the 
island from our decks. It consists of a single volcanic 
peak, hung with an arras of green creeping plants, 
passion-flowers, and trumpet-vines. As for the people, 
they came off' to us dancing over the seas in their 
canoes, and bringing us green oranges and bananas, 
while a huge Union Jack was run up on their flagstaff 
bv those who remained on shore. 

As the first man came on deck, he rushed to the 
captain, and, shaking hands violently, cried, in pure 



274 GREATER BRITAIN. 

English, entirely free from accent, " How do you do, 
captain? How's Yictoria?" There was no disrespect 
in the omission of the title "Queen;" the question 
seemed to come from the heart. The bright eyed h^ds, 
Adams and Young, descendants of the Bounty muti- 
neers, who had been the first to climb our sides, an- 
nounced the coming of Moses Young, the " magistrate" 
of the isle, who presently boarded us in state. He was 
a grave and gentlemanly man, English in appearance, 
but somewhat slightly built, as were, indeed, the lads. 
The magistrate came off to lay before the captain the 
facts relating to a feud which exists between two par- 
ties of the islanders, and upon which they require arbi- 
tration. He had been under the impression that we 
were a man-of-war, as we had fired two guns on enter- 
ing the bay, and being received by our ofiicers, who 
wore the cap of the JSTaval Keserve, he continued in 
the belief till the captain explained what the " Rakaia" 
was, and why she had called at Pitcairn. 

The case which the captain was to have heard judi- 
cially was laid before us for our advice w^hile the flues 
of the ship were being cleaned. When the British 
government removed the Pitcairn Islanders to Norfolk 
Island, no return to the old home was contemplated, 
but the indolent half-castes found the task of keeping 
the ISTorfolk Island convict roads in good repair one 
heavier than they cared to perform, and fifty-two of 
them have lately come back to Pitcairn. A widow 
who returned with the others claims a third of the 
whole island as having been the property of her late 
husband, and is supported in her demand by half the 
islanders, while Moses Young and the remainder of 
the people admit the facts, but assert that the desertion 
of the island was complete, and operated as an entire 
abandonment of titles, which the reoccupation cannot 



PITGAIRN ISLAND. ^ 275 

revive. The success of the wc man's uairn, they say, 
would be the destruction of the prosperity of Pitcairn. 

The case would be an extremely curious one if it 
had to be decided upon legal grounds, for it would 
raise complicated questions both on the nature of Brit- 
ish citizenship and the character of the "occupation" 
title; but it is probable that the islanders will abide 
by the decision of the Governor of ISTew South Wales, 
to which colony they consider themselves in some 
degree attached. 

"When we had drawn up a case to be submitted to 
Sir John Young, at Sydney, our captain made a com- 
mercial treaty with the magistrate, who agreed to sup- 
ply the ships of the new line, whenever daylight allowed 
them to call at Pitcairn, with oranges, bananas, ducks, 
and fowls, for which he was to receive cloth and to- 
bacco in exchange, tobacco being the money of the 
Polynesian Archipelago. Mr. Young told us that his 
people had thirty sheep, which were owned by each of 
the families in turn, the household taking care of them, 
and receiving the profits for one year. Water, he said, 
sometimes falls short in the island, but they then make 
Tise of the juice of the green cocoa-nut. Their school 
is excellent; all the children can read and write, and 
in the election of magistrates they have female suffrage. 

When we went on deck again to talk to the younger 
men, Adams asked us a new question: ^'Have you a 
Sunday at Home, or a British Workman f* Our books 
and papers having been ransacked, Moses Young pre- 
pared to leave the ship, taking with him presents from 
the stores. Besides the cloth, tobacco, hats, and linen, 
there was a bottle of brandy; given for medicine, as 
the islanders are strict teetotalers. While Youno; held 
the bottle in his hand, afraid to trust the lads with it, 
Adams read the label and cried out, " Brandy? IJow 



276 GREATER BRITAIN. 

much for a dose ? . . . . Oh, yes! all right — I know: 
it's good for the women!" When they at last left the 
ship's side, one of the canoes was filled with a crino- 
line and blue silk dress for Mrs. Young, and another 
with a red and brown tartan for Mrs. Adams, both 
given by lady passengers, while the lads went ashore 
in dust-coats and smoking-caps. 

Now that the French, with their singular habit of 
everywhere annexing countries which other colonizing 
nations have rejected, are rapidly occupying all the 
Polynesian groups except the only ones that are of 
value — namely, the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand 
— Pitcairn becomes of some interest as a solitary Brit- 
ish post on the very border of the French dominions, 
and it has for us the stronger claim to notice which is 
raised by the fact that it has figured for the last few 
years on the wrong side of our British budget. 

As we stood out from the bay into the lonely seas, 
the island peak showed a black outline against a pale- 
green sky, but in the west the heavy clouds that in the 
Pacific never fail to cumber the horizon were flowing: 
with a crimson cast by the now-set sun, and the dancing 
wavelets were tinted with reflected hues. 

The "scarlet shafts," which poets have ascribed to 
the tix^pical sunrise, are common at sun^e/ in the South 
Pacific. Almost every night the declining sun, sink- 
ing behind the clouds, throws rays across the sky — not 
yellow, as in Europe and America, but red or rosy 
pink. On the night after leaving Pitcairn, I saw a 
still grander efi*ect of light and color. The sun had 
eet, and in the west the clear greenish sky was hidden 
by pitch-black thqnder-clouds. Through these were 
crimson caves. 

On the twentyruinth day of our voyage, we sighted 
the frowning cliffs of Palliser, wherp the bold bluff*, 



PITCAIRN ISLAND. 211 

coming sheer down three thousand feet, receives the 
full shock of the South Seas — a fitting introduction to 
the grand scenery of New Zealand; and within a few 
hours we were running up the great sea-lake of Port 
Nicholson toward long lines of steamers at a wharf, 
behind which were the cottages of Wellington, the 
capital. 

To me, coming from San Francisco and the Nevadan 
towns, Wellington appeared very English and ex- 
tremely quiet; the town is sunny and still, but with a 
holiday look; indeed, I could not help fancying that it 
was Sunday. A certain haziness as to what was the 
day of the week prevailed among the passengers and 
crew, for we had arrived upon our Wednesday, the 
New Zealand Thursday, and so, without losing an 
hour, lost a day, which, unless b}^ going round the 
world the other way, can never be regained. The 
bright colors of the painted wooden houses, the clear 
air, the rose-beds, and the emerald-green grass, are the 
true cause of the holiday look of the New Zealand 
towns, and Wellington is the gayest of them all ; for, 
owing to the frequency of earthquakes, the townsfolk 
are not allowed to build in brick or stone. The natives 
say that once in every month " Ruaimoko turns him- 
self," and sad things follow to the shaken earth. 

It was now November, the New Zealand spring, and 
the outskirts of Wellington were gay with the cherry- 
trees in full fruiting and English dog-roses in full 
bloom, while on every road-side bank the gorse blazed 
in its coat of yellow: there was, too, to me, a singular 
^harm in the bright green turf, after the tawny grass 
of California. 

Without making a long halt, I started for the South 
Island, first steaming across Cook's Straits, and up 
Queen Charlotte Sound to Picton, and then through 

24 



278 G BEATER BBITAIN. 

the Frencli Pass — a narrow passage filled with fearful 
whirlpools — to Kelson, a gemlike little Cornish village. 
After a day's " cattle-branding" with an old college 
friend at his farm in the valle}^ of the Maitai, I sailed 
asrain for the south, lavinor for a nisrht in Massacre 
Bay, to avoid the worst of a tremendous gale, and then 
coasting down to The Buller and Hokitika — the new 
gold-fields of the colonies. 



CHAPTEE 11. 



HOKITIKA. 



Placed in the very track of storms, and open to the 
sweep of rolling seas from every quarter, exposed to 
waves that run from pole to pole, or from South Africa, 
to Cape Horn, the shores of New Zealand are famed 
for swell and surf, and her western rivers for the danger 
of their bars. Insurances at Melbourne are five times 
as high for the voyage to Hokitika as for the longer 
cruise to Brisbane. 

In our little steamer of a hundred tons, built to cross 
the bars, we had reached the mouth of the Hokitika 
River soon after dark, but lay all night some ten miles 
to the southwest of the port. As we steamed in the 
early morning from our anchorage, there rose up on 
the east the finest sunrise view on which it has been 
my fortune to set eyes. 

A hundred miles of the Southern Alps stood out 
•upon a pale-blue sky in curves of a gloomy white that 
were just beginning to blush with pink, but ended to 



HO KIT IK A. 279 

the southward in a cone of lire that stood up from the 
ocean : it was the snow-dome of Mount Cook strucvr 
by the rising sun. The evergreen bush, flaming with 
the crimson of the rata-blooms, hung upon the mount- 
ain-side, and covered the plain to the very margin of 
the narrow sands with a dense jungle. It was one of 
those sights that haunt men for years, like the eyes of 
Mary in Bellini's Milan picture. 

On the bar, three ranks of waves appeared to stand 
fixed in walls of surf. These huge rollers are sad de- 
stroyers of the [N'ew Zealand coasting ships: a steamer 
w^as lost here a week before my visit, and the harbor- 
master's whale-boat dashed in pieces, and two men 
drowned. 

Lashing everything that was on deck, and battening 
down the hatches in case we should ground in crossing, 
we prepared to run the gauntlet. The steamers often 
ground for an instant while in the trough between the 
waves, and the second sea, pooping them, sweeps them 
from end to end, but carries them into the still water. 
Watching our time, we were- borne on a great rolling 
white-capped wave into the quiet lakelet that forms 
the harbor, just as the sun, coming slowly up behind 
the range, was tiring the Alps from north to south; 
but it was not till we had lain some minutes at the 
wharf that the sun rose to us poor mortals of the sea 
and plain. Hok'itika Bay is strangely like the lower 
portion of the Lago Maggiore, but Mount Rosa is in- 
ferior to Mount Cook. 

As I walked up from the quay to the town, looking 
for the "Empire" Hotel, which I had heard was the 
best in Hokitika, I spied a boy carrying a bundle of 
some newspaper. It was the early edition for the up- 
country coaches, but I asked if he could spare me a 
€opy. He put one into my hand. " How much ?" I 



280 GBEATER BRITAIN, 

asked. "A snapper." "A snapper?"" Ay — a tizzy." 
Understanding this more familiar term, I gave him a 
shilling. Instead of "change," he cocked up his knee, 
slapt the shilling down on it, and said "Cry!" I ac- 
cordingly cried "Woman !" and won, he loyally re- 
turning the coin, and walking off minus a paper. 

When I reached that particular gin-palace which 
was known as the hotel, I found that all the rooms 
were occupied, but that I could, if I pleased, lie dowm 
on a deal side-table in the billiard-room. In our voy- 
age down the coast from Nelson, we had brought for 
The Buller and for Hokitika a cabin full of cut flowers 
for bouquets, of which the diggers are extremely fond. 
The fact w^as pretty enough : the store set upon a sin- 
gle rose — "an English rosebud" — culled from a plant 
that had been brought from the Old Country in a clip- 
per ship, was still more touching, but the flowers made 
sleep below impossible, and it had been blowing too 
hard for me to sleep on deck, so that I was glad to lie 
down upon my table for an hour's rest. The boards 
were rough and full of cracks, and I began to dream 
that, -^valking on the landing-stage, I ran against a 
man, who drew his revolver upon me. In WM-enching 
it from him, I hurt my hand in the lock, and woke to 
find my fingers pinched in one of the chinks of the 
long table. Despairing of further sleep, I started to 
w^alk through Hokitika, and to explore the " clearings" 
which the settlers are making in the bush. 

At Pakihi and The Buller, I had already seen the 
places to which the latest gold-digging "rush" had 
taken place, with the result of planting there some 
thousands of men with nothing to eat but gold — for 
diggers, however shrewd, fall an easy prey to those 
who tell them of spots where gold may be had for the 
digging, and never stop to think how they shall live. 



HOKITIKA. 281 

No attempt is at present made to grow even vegetables 
for the diggers' food: every one is engrossed in the 
search for gold. It is true that the dense jungle is 
being driven back from the diggers' camps by fire and 
sword, but the clearing is only made to give room for 
tents and houses. At The Buller, I had found the 
forest, which comes down at present to the water's 
eage, and crowds upon the twenty shanties and hun- 
dred tents and boweries which form the town, smoking 
with fires on every side, and the parrots chattering 
with fright. The fires obstinately refused to spread, 
but the tall feathery trees were falling fast under the 
axes of some hundred diggers, who seemed not to have 
much romantic sympathy for the sufiferings of the tree- 
ferns they had uprooted, or of the passion-flowers they 
were tearing from the evergreens they had embraced. 

The soil about The Fox, The Buller, The Okitiki, 
and the other west-coast rivers on which gold is found, 
is a black leaf-mould of extraordinary depth and rich- 
ness ; but in [NTew Zealand, as in America, the poor 
lands are first occupied by the settlers, because the fat 
soils will pay for the clearing only when there is already 
a considerable population on the land. On this west 
coast it rains nearly all the year, and vegetation has 
such power, that " rainy Hokitika" must long continue 
to be fed from Christchurch and from ISTelson, for it 
is as hard to keep the land clear as it is at the first to 
clear it. 

The profits realized upon ventures from Nelson to 
the Gold Coast are enormous ; nothing less than fifty 
per cent, will compensate the owners for losses on the 
bars. The first cattle imported from Nelson to The 
Buller fetched at the latter place double the price they 
had cost only two days earlier. One result of this 
maritime usury that was told me by the steward of the 

24* 



282 GREATER BRITAIN. 

steamer in whicli I came down from ]!^elson is worth re- 
cording for the heneiit of the Economists. They had 
on board, he said, a stock of spirits, sufficient for several 
trips, but they altered their prices according to local- 
ity ; from Nelson to The Buller, they charged ^d. a 
drink, bat, once in the river, the price rose to Is., at 
which it remained until the ship left port upon her re- 
turn to Nelson, when it fell again to Qd. A drover 
coming down in charge of cattle was a great friend of 
this steward, and the latter confirmed the story which 
he had told me by waking the drover when we were 
off The Buller bar : " Say, mister, if you want a drink, 
you'd better take it. It'll be shilling drinks in five 
minutes." 

The Hokitikians flatter themselves that their city is 
the '^most rising place" on earth, and it must be con- 
fessed that if population alone is to be regarded, the 
rapidity of its growth has been amazing. At the time 
of my visit, one year and a half had passed since the 
settlement was formed by a few diggers, and it already 
had a permanent population of ten thousand, while no 
less than sixty thousand diggers and their friends 
claimed it for their headquarters. San Francisco 
itself did not rise so fast, Melbourne not much faster; 
but Hokitika, it must be remembered, is not only a 
gold field port, but itself upon the gold field. It is 
San Francisco and Placerville in one — Ballarat and 
Melbourne. 

Inferior in its banks and theaters to Virginia City, 
or even Austin, there is one point in which Hokitika 
surpasses every American mining town that I have 
seen — the goodness, namely, of its roads. Working 
upon them in the bright morning sun which this day 
graced "rainy Hokitika" with its presence, were a 
gang of diggers and sailors, dressed in the clothes 



HOKITIKA. 283 

which every one must wear in a digging town, unless 
he wishes to be stared at by passers-by. Even sailors 
on shore "for a run " here wear cord breeches and high 
tight-fitting boots, often armed with spurs, though, as 
there are no horses except those of the Gold Coast 
Police, they cannot enjoy much riding. The gang 
working on the roads were like the people I met about 
the town — rough, but not ill-looking fellows. To my 
astonishment I saw, conspicuous among their red shirts 
and "jumpers," the blue and white uniform of the 
mounted police; and from the way in which the con- 
stables handled their loaded rifles, I came to the con- 
clusion that the road-menders must be a gang of pris- 
oners. On inquiry, I found that all the New Zealand 
*' convicts," including under this sweeping title men 
convicted for mere petty offenses, and sentenced to 
hard labor for a month, are made to do good practical 
work upon the roads: so much resistance to the police, 
so much new road made or old road mended. I was 
reminded of the Missourian practice of setting pris- 
oners to dig out the stumps that cumber the streets of 
the younger towns : the sentence on a man for being 
drunk is said to be that he pull up a black walnut 
stump; drunk and disorderly, a large buck-eye; as- 
saulting the sheriff, a tough old hickory root, and so on. 

The hair and beard of the short-sentence "convicts" 
in Kew Zealand is never cut, and there is nothing 
hang-dog in their looks ; but their fiices are often 
bright, and even happy. These cheerful prisoners are 
for the most part "runners" — sailors who have broken 
their agreements in order to get upon the diggings, 
and Avho bear their punishment philosophically, with 
the hope of future "finds" before them. 

When the great rush to Melbourne occurred in 1848, 
ships by the hundred were left in the Yarra without a 



284 GREATER BRITAIN. 

single hand to navigate them. Nuggets in the hand 
would not tempt sailors away from the hunt after the 
nuggets in the bush. Ships left Hobson's Bay for 
Chili with half a dozen hands; and in one case that 
came within my knowledge, a captain, his mate, and 
three Maories took a brig across the Pacific to San 
Francisco. 

As the morning wore on, I came near seeing some- 
thing of more serious crime than that for which these 
"runners" were convicted. "Sticking-up," as high- 
way robbery is called in the colonies, has always been 
common in Australia and IN^ew Zealand, but of late 
the bush-rangers, deserting their old tactics, have com- 
menced to murder as well as rob. In three months of 
1866, no less than fifty or sixty murders took place in 
the South Island of ^ew Zealand, all of them com- 
mitted, it was believed, by a gang known as "The 
Thugs." Mr. George Dobson, the government sur- 
veyor, was murdered near Hokitika in May, but it was 
not till ITovember that the gang was broken up by the 
police and volunteers. Levy, Kelly, and Burgess, 
three of the most notorious of the villains, were on 
their trial at Hokitika while I was there, and Sullivan, 
also a member of the band, who had been taken at 
Nelson, had volunteered to give evidence against them. 
Sullivan was to come by steamer from the North, with- 
out touching at The Buller or The Grey; and when 
the ship was signaled, the excitement of the popula- 
tion became considerable, the diggers asserting that 
Sullivan was not only the basest, but the most guilty 
of all the gang. As the vessel ran across the bar and 
into the bay, the police were marched down to the 
landing-place, and a yelling crowd surrounded them, 
threatening to lynch the informer. When the steamer 
came alongside the wharf, Sullivan was not to be seen, 



EOKITIKA. 285 

and it was soon discovered that he had been landed in 
a whale-boat upon the outer beach. Off rushed the 
crowd to intercept the party in the town ; but they 
found the jail gates already shut and barred. 

It was hard to say whether it was for Thuggism or 
for turning Queen's evidence that Sullivan was to be 
lynched : crime is looked at here as leniently as it is 
in Texas. I once met a man who had been a coroner 
at one of the digging towns, who, talking of "old 
times," said, quietly enough: "Oh, yes, plenty of 
work ; we used to make a good deal of it. You see I 
was paid by fees, so I used generally to manage to 
hold four or five inquests on each body. Awful rogues 
my assistants were : I shouldn't like to have some of 
those men's sins to answer for." 

The Gold Coast Police Force, which has been formed 
to put a stop to Thuggism. and bush-ranging, is a splendid 
body of cavalry, about which many good stories are 
told. One digger said to me : " Seen our policemen ? 
"We don't have no younger sons of British peers among 
'em." Another account says that none but members 
of the older English universities are admitted to the 
force. 

There are here, upon the diggings, many military 
men and university graduates, who generally retain 
their polish of manner, though outwardly they are 
often the roughest of the rough. Some of them tell 
istrange stories. One Cambridge man, who was acting 
as a post-office clerk (not at Hokitika), told me that in 
1862, shortly after taking his degree, he went out to 
British Columbia to settle upon land. He soon spent 
his capital at billiards in Victoria City, and went as a 
digger to the Frazer River. There he made a "pile," 
which he gambled away on his road back, and he 
Btruggled through the winter of 1863-4 by shooting 



286 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

and sellins: ^ame. In 1864 he was attached as a hunter 
to the Vancouver's Exploring Expedition, and in 1865 
started with a small sum of money for Australia. He 
was wrecked, lost all he had, and was forced to work 
his passage down to Melbourne. From there he went 
into South Australia as the driver of a reaping ma- 
chine, and was finally, through the efforts of his friends 
in England, appointed to a post-oflice clerkship in New 
Zealand, which colony he intended to quit for Cali- 
fornia or Chili. This was not the only man of educa- 
tion whom I myself found upon the diggings, as I met 
with a Christchurch man, who, however, had left Ox- 
ford without a degree, actually working as a digger in 
a surface mine. 

In the outskirts of Hokitika, I came upon a palpable 
Life Guardsman, cooking for a roadside station, with 
his smock worn like a soldier's tunic, and his cap 
stuck on one ear in Windsor fashion. A "squatter" 
from near Christchurch, who was at The Buller, selling 
sheep, told me that he had an ex-captain in the Guards 
at w^ork for weekly wages on his "sheep-run," and 
that a neighbor had a lieutenant of lancers rail-split- 
ting at his " station." 

Neither the habits nor the morals of this strange 
community are of the best. You never see a drunken 
man, but drinking is apparently the chief occupation 
of that portion of the town population which is not 
actually employed in digging. The mail-coaches 
which run across the island on the great new road, 
and along the sands to the other mining settlements, 
have singularly short stages, made so, it w^ould seem, 
for the benefit of the keepers of the "saloons," for at 
every halt one or other of the passengers is expected 
to "shout," or " stand," as it would be called at home, 
"drinks all round." " What'll yer shout?" is the only 



HOKITIKA. 287 

question ; and want of coined money need be no liinder- 
ance, for " gold-dust is taken at the bar." One of the 
favorite amusements of the diggers at Pakihi, on the 
days when the store-schooner arrives from Nelson, is 
to fill a bucket with champagne, and drink till they 
feel "comfortable." This done, they seat themselvea 
in the road, with their feet on the window-sill of the 
shanty, and, calling to the first passer, ask him to 
drink from the bucket. If he consents — good : if not, 
up they jump, and duck his head in the wine, which 
remains for the next comer. 

"When I left Hokitika, it was by the new road, 170 
miles in length, which crosses the Alps and the island, 
and connects Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, 
with the western parts of the province. The bush be- 
tween the sea and mountains is extremely lovely. The 
highway is "corduroyed" with trunks of the tree-fern, 
and, in the swamps, the sleepers have commenced to 
grow at each end, so that a close-set double row of 
young tree-ferns is rising along portions of the road. 
The bush is densely matted with an undergrowth of 
supple-jack and all kinds of creepers, but here and 
there one finds a grove of tree-ferns twenty feet in 
height, and grown so thickly as to prevent the exist- 
ence of underwood and ground plants. 

The peculiarity w^hich makes the New Zealand west- 
coast scenery the most beautiful in the world to those 
who like more green than California has to show, is 
that here alone can you find semi-tropical vegetation 
growing close up to the eternal snows. The latitude 
and the great moisture of the climate bring the long 
glaciers very low into the valleys; and the absence of 
all true winter, coupled with the rain-fall, causes the 
growth of palmlike ferns upon the ice-riv-er's very 
edge. The glaciers of Mount Cook are the longest in 



288 GREATER BRITAIN. 

the world, except those at the sources of the Indus, 
but close about them have been found tree-ferns of 
thirty and forty feet in height. It is not till you enter 
the mountains that you escape the moisture of the 
coast, and quit for the scenery of the Alps the scenery 
of fairy-land. 

Bumping and tumbling in the mail-cart through the 
rushing blue-gray waters of the Taramakao, I found 
myself within the mountains of the Snowy Range. In 
the Otira Gorge, also know as Arthur's Pass — from 
Arthur Dobson, brother to the surveyor murdered by 
the Thugs — six small glaciers were in sight at once. 
The Rocky Mountains opposite to Denver are loftier 
and not less snowy than the E"ew Zealand Alps, but in 
the Rockies there are no glaciers south of about SO'^ 
]^.; while in Kew Zealand — awinterless country — they 
are common at eight degrees nearer to the line. The 
varying amount of moisture has doubtless caused this 
difference. 

As we journeyed through the pass, there was one 
grand view — and only one: the glimpse of the ravine 
to the eastward of Mount Rollestone, caught from the 
desert shore of Lake Misery — a tarn near the " divide" 
of waters. About its banks there grows a plant, un- 
known, they say, except at this lonely spot — the Rock- 
wood lily — a bushy plant, with a round, polished, con- 
cave leaf, and a cup-shaped flower of virgin white, that 
seems to take its tint from the encircling snows. 

In the evening, we had a view that for gloomy gran- 
deur cannot well be matched — that from near Bealey 
township, where we struck the Waimakiriri Yalley. 
The river bed is half a mile in width, the stream itself 
not more than ten yards across, but, like all J^ew Zea- 
land rivers, subjects to freshets, which till its bed to a 
great depth with a surging, foaming flood. Some of 



HOKITIKA. 289 

the victims of the Waimakiriri are buried alongside the 
road. Dark evergreen bush shuts in the river bed, 
and is topped on the one side by dreary frozen peaks, 
and on the other by still gloomier mountains of bare 
rock. 

Our road, next morning, from The Cass, where we 
had spent the night, lay through the eastern foot-hills 
and down to Canterbury Plains by way of Porter's 
Pass — a narrow track on the top of a tremendous 
precipice, but soon to be changed for a road cut along 
its face. The plains are one great sheep-run, open, 
almost flat, and upon which you lose all sense of size. 
At the mountain- foot they are covered with tall, coarse, 
native grass, and are dry, like the Kansas prairie; about 
Christchurch, the English clover and English grasses 
have usurped the soil, and all is fresh and green. 

E'ew Zealand is at present divided into nine semi- 
independent provinces, of which three are large and 
powerful, and the remainder comparatively small and 
poor. Six of the nine are true States, having each its 
history as an independent settlement; the remaining 
three are creations of the Federal government or of 
the crown. 

These are not the only difficulties in the way of N^ew 
Zealand statesmen, for the provinces themselves are 
far from being homogeneous units. Two of the 
wealthiest of all the States, which were settled as col- 
onies with a religious tinge — Otago, Presbyterian; and 
Canterbury, Episcopalian — have been blessed or cursed 
with the presence of a vast horde of diggers, of no par- 
ticular religion, and free from any reverence for things 
established. Canterbury Province is not only politi- 
cally divided against itself, but geographically split in 
twain by the Snowy Range, and the diggers hold the 

25 



290 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

west-coast bush, the old settlers the east-coast plain. 
East and west, each cries out that the other side is 
robbing it. The Christchurch people say that their 
money is being spent on Westland, and the Westland 
diggers cry out against the foppery and aristocratic 
pretense of Christchurch. A division of the province 
seems inevitable, unless, indeed, the '' Centralists" gain 
the day, and bring about either a closer union of the 
whole of the provinces, coupled with a grant of local 
self-government to their subdivisions, or else the entire 
destruction of the provincial system. 

The division into provinces was at one time neces- 
sary, from the fact that the settlements were histor- 
ically distinct, and physically cut off from each other 
by the impenetrability of the bush and the absence of 
all roads; but the barriers are now surmounted, and 
no sufficient reason can be found for keeping up ten 
cabinets and ten legislatures for a population of only 
200,000 souls. Such is the costliness of the provincial 
system and of Maori wars, that the taxation of the 
]^ew Zealanders is nine times as heavy as that of their 
brother colonists in Canada. 

It is not probable that so costly and so inefficient a 
system of government as that which now obtains in 
New Zealand can long continue to exist. It is not 
only dear and bad, but dangerous in addition; and 
during my visit to Port Chalmers, the province of 
Otago was loudly threatening secession. Like all 
other federal constitutions, that of New Zealand fails 
to provide a sufficiently strong central power to meet 
a divergence of interests between the several States. 
The system which failed in Greece, which failed in 
Germany, which failed in America, has failed here in 
the antipodes; and it may be said that, in these days 
of improved communications, wherever federation is 



HOKITIKA. 291 

possible, a still closer union is at least as likely to prove 
lasting. 

!N"ew Zealand suffers, not only by the artiiicial di- 
vision into provinces, but also by the physical division 
of the country into two great islands, too far apart to 
be ever thoroughly homogeneous, too near together to 
be wholly independent of each other. The difficulty 
has been hitherto increased by the existence in the 
IN^orth of a powerful and warlike native race, all but 
extinct in the South Island. .N'ot only have the 
Southern people no native wars, but they have no 
native claimants from whom every acre fur the settler 
must be bought, and they naturally decline to submit 
to ruinous taxation to purchase Parewanui from, or to 
defend Taranaki against, the Maories. Having been 
thwarted by the Home government in the agitation for 
the "separation" of the islands, the Southern people 
now aim at "Ultra-Provincialism,'^ declaring for a sys- 
tem under which the provinces would virtually be in- 
dependent colonies, connected only by a confederation 
of the loosest kind. 

The jealousies of the great towns, here as in Italy, 
have much bearing upon the political situation. Auck- 
land is for separation, because in that event it would 
of necessity become the seat of the government of the 
North Island. In the South, Christchurch and Dun- 
edin have similar claims; and each of them, ignoring 
the other, begs for separation in the hope of becoming 
the Southern capital. "Wellington and JN^elson alone 
are for the continuance of the federation — Wellington 
because it is already the capital, and I^elson because 
it is intriguing to supplant its neighbor. Although 
the difficulties of the moment mainly arise out of the 
war expenditure, and will terminate with the extinc- 
tion of the Maori race, her geographical shape almost 



292 GREATER BRITAIN. 

forbids us to hope that Kew Zealand will ever form a 
single country under a strong central government. 

To obtain an adequate idea of the difficulty of his 
task, a new governor, on landing in l^ew Zealand, 
could not do better than cross the Southern Island. 
On the west side of the mountains he would find a 
restless digger-democracy, likely to be succeeded in 
the future by small manufacturers, and spade-farmers 
growing root-crops upon small holdings of fertile loam ; 
on the east, gentlemen sheep-farmers, holding their 
twenty thousand acres each ; supporters by their posi- 
tion of the existing state of things, or of an aristocratic 
republic, in which men of their own caste would rule. 

Christchurch — Episcopalian, dignified — the first set- 
tlement in the province, and still the capital, affects to 
despise Hokitika, already more wealthy and more 
populous. Christchurch imports English rooks to caw 
in the elm-trees of her cathedral close ; Hokitika im- 
ports men. Christchurch has not fallen away from her 
traditions : every street is named from an English 
bishopric, and the society is that of an English country 
town. 

Eeturning northward, along the coast, in the shade 
of the cold and gloomy mountains of the Kaikoura 
Range, I found at Wellington two invitations awaiting 
me to be present at great gatherings of the native 
tribes. 

The next day I started for the Manawatu River and 
Parewanui Pah. 



POLYNESIANS. 293 



CHAPTER III. 

POLYNESIANS. 

The name "Maori" is said to mean "native," but 
the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in 
the title "[N'atives of the Soil" is one which conflicts 
with their traditions. These make them out to be 
mere interlopers — Tahitians, they themselves say — 
who, within historic ages, sailed down island by island 
in their war canoes, massacring the inhabitants, and, 
finally landing in ISTew Zealand, found a numerous 
horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the 
forests of the South Island. Favored by a year of 
exceptional drought, they set fire to the woods, and 
burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea the aborig- 
inal possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe 
that this account is in the main correct, bat hold that 
the Maori race is Malay, and not originally Tahitian : 
others have tried to show that the conflict between 
blacks and browns was not confined to these two 
islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia; 
and that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not 
by the destruction of the blacks, but by the amalga- 
mation of the opposing races. 

The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to 
New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations 
are circumstantial in the extreme, and describe the 
first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the 
people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and 
many such details of the landing. The names of the 

25=^ 



294 GREATER BRITAIN. 

chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of "cata- 
logue of ships," and the wars of the settlers are nar- 
rated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common 
to the legends of all lands. 

The canoe fleet reached N'ew Zealand in the fifteenth 
century it is believed, and the people landed chanting 
a chorus-speech, which is still preserved : 

"We come at last to this fair land — a resting-place ; 
Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our 
"hearts for food." 

That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no 
doubt : a bird with them is " manu," a fish " ika" (the 
Greek ^ix^oq, become with the digamma "piscis" and 
"poisson;" and connected with *'fisch," and *'fish"), 
as they are throughout the Mala3^an archipelago and 
Polynesian isles ; the Maori " atua," a god, is the 
" hotua" of the Friendly Islanders; the "wahres," or 
native huts, are identical in all the islands ; the names 
of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia, 
and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving 
grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and 
"• pahs," and that of tabooing things, places, times, and 
persons, prevail from Hawaii to Stewart's Land, though 
not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga Isles, 
where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from 
disturbing by their quacking the sacred stillness of 
*'tapu time." 

Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay 
peninsula as the cradle of the race, and the personal 
resemblance of the Maories to the Malays is very 
strong, except in the setting of the eyes; while the 
figures on the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs have 
eyes more oblique than are now found among the 
Maori people. Strangely enough, the J'j'ew Zealand. 



POLYNESIANS. 295 

*pah" is identical with the Burmese " stockade," but 
the word ** pah" stands both for the palisade and for 
the village of wahr^s which it contains. The Poly- 
nesian and Malay tongues have not much in common ; 
but that variations of language sufficiently great to 
leave no apparent tic spring up in a few centuries, 
cannot be denied by us who know for certain that 
"visible" and "optician" come from a common root, 
and can trace the steps through which "jour" is de- 
rived from ^'dies." 

The tradition of the Polynesians is that they came 
from Paradise, which they place, in the southern 
islands, to the north ; in the northern islands, to the 
westward. This legend indicates a migration from 
Asia to the northern islands, and thence southward to 
New Zealand, and accounts for the non-colonization of 
Australia by the Polynesians. The sea between New 
Zealand, and Australia is too rough and wide to be 
traversed by canoes, and the wind-chart shows that the 
track of the Malays must have been eastward along 
the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to the south- 
west with the southeast trade-wind right abeam to their 
canoes. 

The wanderings of the Polynesian race were, pro- 
bably, not confined to the Pacific. Ethnology is as 
yet in its infancy : we know nothing of the Tudas of 
the Neilgherries ; we ask in vain who are the Gonds; 
we are in doubt about the Japanese ; we are lost in 
perplexity as to who we may be ourselves ; but there 
is at least as much ground for the statement that the 
Red Indians are Malays as for the assertion that we are 
Saxons. 

The resemblances between the Red Indians and the 
Pacific Islanders are innumerable. Strachey's account 
of the Indians of Virginia, written in 1612, needs but a 



296 GREATER BRITAIN. 

change in the names to fit the Maories : Powhdtan'a 
house is that of William Thompson. Cannibalism 
prevailed in Brazil and along the Pacific coast of !N^orth 
America at the time of their discovery, and even the 
Indians of Chili ate many an early navigator ; the 
aborigines of Vancouver Island are tattooed ; their 
canoes resemble those of the Malays, and the mode of 
paddling is the same from Kew Zealand to Hudson's 
Bay — from Florida to Singapore. Jade ornaments of 
the shape of the Maori "Heitiki" (the charm worn 
about the neck) have been found by the French in 
Guadaloupe ; the giant masonry of Central America 
is identical with that of Cambodia and Siam. Small- 
legged squatting figures, like those of the idols of China 
and Japan, not only surmount the gate-posts of the New 
Zealand pahs, but are found eastward to Honduras, 
westward to Burraah, to Tartary, and to Ceylon. The 
fiber mats, common to Polynesia and Red India, are 
unknown to savages elsewhere, jand the feather head- 
dresses of the Maories are almost identical with those 
of the Delawares or Hurons. 

In the Indians of America and of Polynesia there 
is the same hatred of continued toil, and the same 
readiness to engage in violent exertion for a time. Su- 
perstition and witchcraft are common to all untaught 
peoples, but in the Malays and red men they take 
similar shapes; and the Indians of Mexico and Peru 
had, like all the Polynesians, a sacred language, un- 
derstood only by the priests. The American altars 
were one with the temples of the Pacific, and were not 
confined to Mexico, for they form the " mounds" of 
Ohio and Illinois. There is great likeness between 
the legend of Maui, the Maori hero, and that of Hia- 
watha, especially in the history of how the sun was 
noosed, and made to move more slowly through the 



POLYNESIANS. 297 

skies, so as to give men long days for toil. The re- 
semblance of the Maori ^'runanga/' or assembly for 
debate, to the Indian council is extremely close, and 
throughout America and Polynesia a singular blending 
of poetry and ferocity is characteristic of the Malays. 

In color, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike; 
but color does not seem to be, ethnologically speaking, 
of much account. The Hindoos of Calcutta have the 
same features as those of Delhi ; but the former are 
black, the latter brown, or, if high-caste men, almost 
white. Exposure to sun, in a damp, hot climate, 
seems to blacken every race that it does not destroy. 
The races that it will finally destroy, tropical heat first 
whitens. The English planters of Mississippi and Flor- 
ida are extremely dark, yet there is not a suspicion of 
black blood in their veins : it is the white blood of the 
slaves to which the Abolitionists refer in their philip- 
pics. The Jews at Bombay and Aden are of a deep 
brown; in Morocco they are swarthy; in England, 
nearly white. 

Religious rites and social customs outlast both phys- 
ical tj'pe and language ; but even were it otherwise, 
there is great resemblance in build and feature be- 
tween the Polynesians and many of the "Red-Indian" 
tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are 
described by the early navigators not as tall, grave, 
hooked-nose men, but as copper colored, pleasant look- 
ing, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican 
Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander 
than to the Delaware or Cherokee. 

In reaching South America, there were no distances 
to be overcome such as to present insurmountable dif- 
ficulties to the Malays. Their canoes have frequently, 
within the years that we have had our missionary 
Btations in the islands, made involuntary voyages of 



298 GREATER BRITAIN. 

BIX or seven hundred miles. A Western editor has 
said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for dis- 
covering America, as it is so large that he could not 
well have missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that 
the chances must have been thousands to one against 
its being reached by canoes sailing even from the near- 
est land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter Island 
was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove 
canoes to Easter Island would have driven them from 
the island to Chili and Peru. The Polynesian Malays 
would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms, 
by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war time, 
whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped 
into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful con- 
queror who had dined; this occurs, however, only 
when the market is already surfeited with human 
joints. 

In calling from America to Kew Zealand, we met 
strong westerly winds before we had gone half way 
across the seas, and, south of the trade-wind region, 
these blow constantly to within a short distance of the 
American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of 
the Chilian current. A canoe blown off from the 
southern islands, and running steadily before the wind, 
would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito. 

When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he 
was, perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was 
" The Indies" that he had found — an India peopled by 
the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered of 
all the nations of the world, but one which the English 
seem destined to supplant. 

The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, 
emigrants from the winterless climate of the Malay 
peninsula and Polynesian archipelago; and, although 
the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited them 



PAREWANUI PAH. 299 

not ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented 
the spread of the bands they planted there. At all 
times if has been remarked by ethnologists and accli- 
matizers that it is easier by far to carry men and beasts 
from the poles toward the tropics than from the tropics 
to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to J^ew 
Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature's laws, and 
their descendants .are paying the penalty in extinction. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PAREWANUI PAH. 

" Here is Petatone. 
This is the 10th of December; 
The sun shines, and the birds sing; 
Clear is the water in rivers and streams ; 
Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air. 
This is the 10th of December ; 
But where is the money ? 

Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed, 
And here at last is Petatone; 
But where is the money?" 

A band of Maori women, slowly chanting in a high, 
strained key, stood at the gate of a pah, and met with 
this song a few Englishmen who were driving rapidly 
on to their land. 

Our track lay through a swamp of the !N"ew Zealand 
flax. Huge swordlike leaves and giant flower-stalks 
all but hid from view the Maori stockades. To the 
left was a village of low wahres, fenced round with a 
double row of lofty posts, carved with rude images of 
gods and men, and having posterns here and there. 



300 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

On the right were groves of karakas, children of Tane- 
mahuta, the New Zealand sacred trees — under their 
shade, on a hill, a camp and another and larger pah. 
In startling contrast to the dense masses of the oily 
leaves, there stretched a great extent of light-green 
sward, where there were other camps and a tall flag- 
staff, from which floated the white flag and the l^nion 
Jack, emblems of British sovereignty and peace. 

A thousand kilted Maories dotted the green land- 
scape with patches of brilliant tartans and scarlet oloth. 
Women lounged about, whiling away the time with 
dance and song; and from all the corners of the ^lade 
the soft cadence of the Maori cry of welcome came 
floating to u.s on the breeze, sweet as the sound of dis- 
tant bells. 

As we drove quickly on, we found ourselves in the 
midst of a thronging crowd of square-built men, brown 
in color, and for the most part not much darker than 
Spaniards, but with here and there a woolly negro in 
their ranks. Glancing at them as we were hurried 
past, we saw that the men were robust, well limbed, 
and tall. They greeted us pleasantly with many a 
cheerful, open smile, but the faces of the older people 
were horribly tattooed in spiral curves. The chiefs 
carried battle-clubs of jade and bone ; the women wore 
strange ornaments. At the flagstaflf we pulled up, 
and, while the preliminaries of the council were ar- 
ranged, had time to discuss with Maori and with 
"Pak^ha" (white man) the questions that had brought 
us thither. 

The purchase of an enormous block of land — that 
of the Manawatu^ — had long been an object wished for 
and worked for by the Provincial Government of Wel- 
lington. The completion of the sale it was that had 
brought the Superintendent, J)r, Featherston, and 



PAREWANUI PAH. 301 

humbler Pakehas to Parewanui Pah. It was not only 
that the land was wanted by way of room for the flood 
of settlers, but purchase by government was, more- 
over, the only means whereby war between the various 
native claimants of the land could be prevented. The 
Pak^ha and Maori had agreed upon a price ; the ques- 
tion that remained for settlement was how the money 
should be shared. One tribe had owned the land from 
the earliest times; another had conquered some miles 
of it; a third had had one of its chiefs cooked and 
eaten upon the ground. In the eye of the Maori law, 
the last of these titles was the best: the blood of a 
chief overrides all mere historic claims. The two 
strongest human motives concurred to make war prob- 
able, for avarice and jealousy alike prevented agree- 
ment as to the division of the spoil. Each of the three 
tribes claiming had half a dozen allied and related 
nations upon the ground; every man was there who 
had a claim, direct or indirect, or thought he had, to 
any portion of the block. Individual ownership and 
tribal ownership conflicted. The ]!s^gatiapa were well 
armed; the Ngatiraukawa had their rifles; the Wang- 
anuis had sent for theirs. The greatest tact on the 
part of Dr. Featherston was needed to prevent a tight 
such as would have roused New Zealand from Auck- 
land to Port Nicholson. 

On a signal from the Superintendent, the heralds 
went round the camps and pahs to call the tribes to 
council. The summons was a long-drawn minor- 
descending-scale : a plaintiff cadence, which at a dis- 
tance blends into a bell-like chord. The words mean: 
"Come hither! Come hither! Come! come! Maories! 

Come !" and men, women, and children soon came 

thronging in from every side, the chiefs bearing scepters 
und spears of ceremony, and their women wearing 

26 



302 GREATER BRITAIN. 

round their necks the symbol of nobility, the Heitiki, 
or greenstone god. These images, we were told, have 
pedigrees, and names like those of men. 

We, with the resident magistrate of Wanganui, 
seated ourselves beneath the flagstaff. A chief, meet- 
ing the people as they came up, stayed them with the 
gesture that Homer ascribes to Hector, and bade them 
sit in a huge circle round the spar. 

No sooner were we seated on our mat than there 
ran siowl}^ into the center of the ring a plumed and 
kilted chief, with sparkling eyes, the perfection of a 
savage. Halting suddenly, he raised himself upon his 
toes, frowned, and stood brandishing his short feathered 
spear. It was Huiiia t^ Hak^k^, the young chief of 
the Ngatiapa. 

Throwing off' his plaid, he commenced to speak, 
springing hither and thither with leopard-like freedom 
of gait, and sometimes leaping high into the air to 
emphasize a word. Fierce as were the gestures, his 
speech was conciliatory, and the Maori flowed from 
his lips — a soft Tuscan tongue. As, with a movement 
full of vigorous grace, he sprang back to the ranks, to 
take his seat, there ran round the ring a hum and buzz 
of popular applause. 

" Governor" Hunia was followed by a young Wan- 
ganui chief, who wore hunting breeches and high 
boots, and a long black mantle over his European 
clothes. There was something odd in the shape of the 
cloak ; and when we came to look closely at it, we 
found that it was the skirt of the riding-habit of his 
half-caste wife. The great chiefs paid so little heed to 
this flippant fellow, as to stand up and harangue their 
tribes in the middle of his speech, which came thus to 
an untimely end. 

A funny old graybeard, Wait^r^ Maru Maru, next 



PAREWANUI PAH, 303 

rose, and, smothering down the jocularity of his face, 
turned toward us for a moment the typical head of 
Peter, as you see it on the windows of every modern 
church — for a moment only, for, as he raised his hand 
to wave his tribal scepter, his apostolic drapery began 
to slip from off his shoulders, and he had to clutch at 
it with the energy of a topman taking-in a reef in a 
whole gale. His speech was full of Nestorian proverbs 
and wise saws, but he wandered off into a history of 
the Wanganui lands, by which he soon became as 
wearied as we ourselves were; for he stopped short, 
and, with a twinkle of the eye, said : " Ah ! Wait^re 
is no longer young: he is climbing the snow-clad 
mountain Ruahine ; he is becoming an old man;" and 
down he sat. 

Karanama, a small Ngatiraukawa chief w^ith a white 
moustache, who looked like an old French concierge, 
followed Maru Maru, and, with much use of liis scepter, 
related a dream foretelling the happy issue of the 
negotiations; for the little man was one of those 
" dreamers of dreams" against whom Moses warned 
the Israelites. 

Karanama's was not the only trance and vision of 
which we heard in the course of these debates. The 
Maories believe that in their dreams the seers hear 
great bands of spirits singing chants : these when they 
wake the prophets reveal to all the people; but it is 
remarked that the vision is generally to the advantage 
of the seer's tribe. 

Karanama's speech was answered V)y the head chief 
of the liangitane Maories, Te Peeti Te Awe Awe, who, 
throwing oli* his upper clothing as he warmed to his 
subject, and strutting pompously round and round the 
ring, challenged Karanama to immediate battle, or his 
tribe to general encounter ; but he cooled down as he 



804 GREATER BRITAIN. 

went on, and in his last sentence showed us that Maori 
oratory, however ornate usually, can be made extremely 
terse. "■ It is hot," he said — *' it is hot, and the very 
birds are loath to sing. We have talked for a week, 
and are therefore dry. Let us take our share — X10,000, 
or whatever we can get, and then we shall be dry no 
more." 

The Maori custom of walking about, dancing, leaping, 
undressing, running, and brandishing spears during 
the delivery of a speech is convenient for all parties : 
to the speaker, because it gives him time to think of 
what he shall say next; to the listener, because it allows 
him to weigh the speaker's words ; to the European 
hearer, because it permits the interpreter to keep pace 
with the orator without an eflbrt. On this occasion, 
the resident magistrate of Wanganui, Mr. Buller, a 
Maori scholar of eminence, and the attached friend of 
some of the chiefs, interpreted for Dr. Featherston ; 
and we were allowed to lean over him in such a way as 
to hear every word that passed. That the able Super- 
intendent of Wellington — the great protector of tho 
Maories, the man to whom they look as to Queen Vic- 
toria's second in command, should be wholly depend- 
ent upon interpreters, however skilled, seems almost 
^too singular to be believed ; but it is possible that Dr. 
Featherston may find in pretended want of knowledge 
much advantage to the government. He is able to 
collect his thoughts before he replies to a difficult 
question ; he can allow an epithet to escape his notice 
in the filter of translation ; he can listen and speak 
with greater dignity. 

The day was wearing on before T^ Peeti's speech 
was done, and, as the Maories say, our waistbands be- 
gan to slip down low; so all now went to lunch, both 
Maori and Pak^ha, they sitting in circles, each with 



FABEWANUI PAE. 305 

his bowl, or flax-blade dish, and wooden spoon, we 
having a table and a chair or two in the Mission- 
house ; but we were so tempted by Hori Kingi's white- 
bait that we begged some of him as we passed. The 
Maori es boil the little fish in milk, and flavor them 
with leeks. Great fish, meat, vegetables, almost all 
they eat, in short, save whitebait, is "steamed" in the 
underground native oven. A hole is dug, and filled 
with wood, and stones are piled upon the wood, a 
small opening being left for draught. While the wood 
is burning, the stones become red-hot, and fall through 
into the hole. They are then covered with damp fern, 
or else with wet mats of flax, plaited at the moment; the 
meat is put in, and covered with more mats; the whole 
is sprinkled with water, and then earth is heaped on 
till the vapor ceases to escape. The joint takes about 
an hour, and is delicious. Fish is wrapped in a kind 
of dock-leaf, and so steamed. 

While the men's eating was thus going on, many of 
the women stood idly round, and we were enabled to 
judge of Maori beauty. A profusion of long, crisp 
curls, a short black pipe thrust between stained lips, a 
pair of black eyes gleaming from a tattooed face, de- 
note the Maori helle, who wears for her only robe a 
long bedgown of dirty calico, but whose ears and neck 
are tricked out with greenstone ornaments, the signs 
of birth and wealth. Here and there you find a girl 
with long, smooth tresses, and almond-shaped black 
eyes: these charms often go along with prominent, thin 
features, and suggest at once the Jewess and the gipsy 
girl. The women smoke continually; the men, not 
much. 

When at four o'clock we returned to the flagstaflT, 
we found that the temperature, which during the 
morning had been too hot, had become that of a fine 

26* 



306 GREATER BRITAIN. 

English June — the air light, the trees and grass lit by 
a gleaming yellow sunshine that reminded me of the 
Californian haze. 

During luncheon we had heard that Dr. Featherston's 
proposals as to the division of the purchase-money had 
been accepted by the Ngatiapa, but not by Hunia him- 
self, whose vanity would brook no scheme not of his 
own conception. We were no sooner returned to the 
ring than he burst in upon us with a defiant speech. 
"Unjust," he declared, "as was the proposition of 
great ' P^taton^' (Featherston), he would have ac- 
cepted it for the sake of peace had he been allowed to 
divide the tribal share; but as the Wanganuis insisted 
on having a third of his ^15,000, and as P^taton^ 
seemed to support them in their claim, he should have 
nothing more to do with the sale." "The Wangenuis 
claim as our relatives," he said: "verily, the pumpkin- 
shoots spread far." 

Karanama, the seer, stood up to answer Hunia, and 
began his speech in a tone of ridicule. " Ilunia is like 
the ti-tree : if you cut him down he sprouts again." 
Hunia sat quietly through a good deal of this kind of 
wit, till at last some epithet provoked him to interrupt 
the speaker. "What a fine fellow you are, Karanama; 
you'll tell us soon that 3'ou've two pair of legs." " Sit 
down !" shrieked Karanarna, and a word-war ensued, 
but the abuse was too full of native raciness and 
vigor to be tit for English ears. The chiefs kept danc- 
ing round the ring, threatening each other with their 
spears. "Why do you not hurl at me, Karanama?" 
said Hunia; "it is easier to parry spears than lies." 
At last Hunia sat down. 

Karanama, feinting and making at him with his 
spear, reproached Hunia with a serious flaw in his 
pedigree — a blot which is said to account for Hunia's 



PAEEWANUI PAH. 307 

hatred to the Kgatiraukjiwa, to whom his mother was 
for years a slave. Hunia, without rising from the 
ground, shrieked "Liar!" Karanama again spoke the 
obnoxious word. Springing from the ground, Hunia 
snatched his spear from where it stood, and ran at his 
enemy as though to strike him. Karanama stood stoek- 
stilL Coming up to him at a charge, Hunia suddenly 
stopped, raised himself on tiptoe, shaking his spear, 
and flung out some contemptuous epithet; then turned, 
and stalked slowly, with a springing gait, back to his 
own corner of the ring. There he stood, haranguing 
his people in a bitter undertone. Karanama did the 
like with his. The interpreters could not keep pace 
with what was said. We understood that the chiefs 
were calling each upon his tribe to support him, it need 
were, in war. After a few minutes of this pause they 
wheeled round, as though by a common impulse, and 
again began to pour out torrents of abuse. The ap- 
plause became frequent, hums quickened into shouts, 
cheer followed cheer, till at last the ring was alive with 
men and women springing from the ground, and cry- 
ing out on the opposing leader for a dastard. 

We had previously been told to have no fear that 
resort would be had to blows. The Maories never light 
upon a sudden quarrel: war is with them a solemn act, 
entered upon only after much deliberation. Those of 
us who were strangers to ]N"ew Zealand were neverthe- 
less not without our doubts, while for half an hour we 
lay upon the grass watching the armed champions 
running round the ring, challenging each other to 
mortal combat on the spot. 

The chieftains at last became exhausted, and the 
Mission-bell beginning to toll for evening chapel, Hunia 
broke olf in the middle of his abuse : "Ah ! I hear the 
bell!" and, turning, stalked out of the ring toward his 



308 GREATER BRITAIN. 

pah, leaving it to be inferred, by those who did not 
know him, that he was going to attend the service. 
The meeting broke up in confusion, and the Upper 
"Wanganui tribes at once began their march toward 
the mountains, leaving behind them only a delegation 
of their chiefs. 

As we drove down to the coast, we talked over the 
close resemblance of the Maori runanga to the Homeric 
council; it had struck us all. Here, as in the Greek 
camp, we had the ring of people, into which advanced 
the lance-bearing or scepter-bearing chiefs, they alone 
speaking, and the people backing them only by a hum : 
*' The block of wood dictates not to the carver, neither 
the people to their chiefs," is a Maori proverb. The 
boasting of ancestry, and bragging of deeds and mili- 
tary exploits, to which modern wind-bags would only 
casually allude, was also thoroughly Homeric. la 
Hunia we had our Achilles; the retreat of Hunia to 
his wahr^ was that of Achilles to his tent ; the cause of 
quarrel alone was different, though in both cases it 
arose out of the division of spoil, in the one case the 
result of lucky wars, in the other of the Pak^ha's weak- 
ness. The Argive and Maori leaders are one in fire, 
figure, port, and mien; alike, too, even in their sulki- 
ness. In Waiter^ and Aperahama Tipai we had two 
Nestors; our Thersites was Porea, the jester, a half- 
mad buffoon, continually mimicking the chiefs or in- 
terrupting them, and being by them or their messen- 
gers as often kicked and cuffed. In the frequency of 
repetition, the use of proverbs and of simile, the Mao- 
ries resemble not Homer's Greeks so much as Homer's 
self; but the calling together of the people by the 
heralds, the secret conclave of the chiefs, the feast, the 
conduct of the assembly — all were the exact repetition 
of the events recorded in the first and second books ol 



PAREWANUI FAH, 309 

the *^ Iliad" asliaving happened on the Trojan plains. 
The single point of difference was not in favor of the 
Greeks ; the Maori women took their place in council 
with tlie men. 

As we drove home, a storm came on, and hung 
about the coast so long, that it was not till near eleven 
at night that we were able to take our swim in the 
heated waters of the Manawatu River, and frighten otf 
every duck and heron in the district. 

In the morning, we rose to alarming news. Upon 
the pretext of the presence in the. neighborhood of 
the Hau-Hau chief Wi Hapi, with a war party of 
200 men, the unarmed Parewanui natives had sent 
to Wanganui for their guns, and it was only by a 
conciliatory speech at the midnight runanga that Mr. 
Buller had succeeded in preventing a complete break- 
up of all the camps, if not an intertribal war. There 
seemed to be white men behind the scenes who were 
not friendly to the sale, and the debate had lasted 
from dark till dawn. 

While we were at breakfast, a Kgatiapa officer of 
the native contingent brought down a letter to Dr. 
Featherston from Hunia and Hori Kingi, calling us to 
a general meeting of the tribes convened for noon, to 
be held in the Ngatiapa Pah. The letter was addressed, 
^'Kia te Petatone te Huperintene"— ^'To the Feather- 
ston, the Superin4:endent" — the alterations in the chief 
words being made to bring them within the grasp of 
Maori tongues, which cannot sound /'5, th's^ nor sibi- 
lants of any kind. The absence of harsh sounds, and 
the rule which makes every word end with a vowel, 
give a peculiar softness and charm to the Maroi lan- 
guage. Sugar becomes huka ; scissors, hikiri ; sheep, 
hipi; and so with all English words adopted into 
Maori. The rendering of the Hebrew names of the 



310 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Old Testament is often singular: Genesis becomes 
Kenehi ; Exodus is altered into Ekoruhe ; Leviticus is 
hardly recognizable in Rewitikuha ; Tiuteronomi reads 
strangely for Deuteronomy, and Hohua for Joshua; 
Jacob, Isaac, Moses, become Hakopa, Ihaka, and 
Mohi ; Egypt is softened into Ihipa, Jordan into Ho- 
rdmo. The list of the nations of Canaan seems to have 
been a stumbling-block in the missionaries' way. The 
success obtained with Girgashites has not been great ; 
it stands Kirekahi ; Gaash is transmuted into Kaaha, 
and Eleazar into Ereatara. 

When we drove on to the ground all was at a dead- 
lock — the flagstaff bare, the chiefs sleeping in their 
wahres, and the common folk whiling away the hours 
with haka songs. Dr. Featherston retired from the 
ground, declaring that till the Queen's flag was hoisted 
he would attend no debate ; but he permitted us to 
wander in among the Maories. 

We were introduced to Tamiana te Rauparaha, chief 
of the l^gatitoa branch of the ISTgatiraukawa, and sou 
of the great cannibal chief of the same name, who 
murdered Captain Wakefield. Old Rauparaha it was 
who hired an English ship to carry him and his nation 
to the South Island, where they ate several tribes, boil- 
ing the chiefs, by the captain's consent, in the ship's 
coppers, and salting down for future use the common 
people. When the captain, on return to port, claimed 
his price, Rauparaha told him to go about his business, 
or he should be salted too. The captain took the hint, 
but he did not escape for long, as he was finally eateu 
by the Sandwich Islanders in Hawaii. 

In answer to our request for a dance-song, Tamiana 
and Horomona Toremi replied, through an interpreter, 
that ''the hands of the singers should beat time as fast 
as the pinions of the wild duck j" and in a minute we 



PAREWANUI PAH. 311 

were in the middle of an animated crowd of boys and 
women collected by Porea, the buffoon. 

As soon as the singers had squatted upon the grass, 
the jester began to run slowly up and down between 
their ranks as they sat swinging backward and for- 
ward in regular time, groaning in chorus, and looking 
upward with distorted faces. 

In a second dance, a girl standing out upon the 
grass chanted the air — a kind of capstan song — and 
then the "dancers," who were seated in one long row, 
joined in chorus, breathing violently in perfect time, 
half forming words, but not notes, swinging from side 
to side like the howling dervishes, and using frightful 
gestures. Tbis strange whisper- roaring went on in- 
creasing in rapidity and herceness, till at last the 
singers worked themselves into a frenzy, in which they 
rolled their eyes, stiffened the arms and legs, clutched 
and clawed with the lingers, and snorted like mad- 
dened horses. Stripping off their clothes, they looked 
more like the Maories of thirty years ago than those 
who see them only at the mission-stations would be- 
lieve. Other song-dances, in which the singers stood 
striking their heels at measured intervals upon the 
earth, Avere taken up with equal vigor by the boys and 
women, the grown men in their dignity keeping them- 
selves aloof, although in his heart every Maori loves 
mimetic dance and song. We remarked that in the 
"haka" the old women seemed more in earnest than 
the young, who were always bursting into laughter, 
and forgetting words and time. 

The savage love for semitones makes Maori music 
somewhat wearisome to the English ear; so after a 
time we began to walk through the pahs and sketch 
the Maories, to their great delight. I was drawing 
the grand old head of a venerable dame — Oriuhia t4 



312 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Aka — when she asked to see what I was about. Aa 
soon as I showed her the sketch, she began to call me 
names, and from her gestures I saw that the insult was 
in the omission of the tattooing on her chin. When I 
inserted the stripes and curves, her delight was such 
that I greatly feared she would have embraced me. 

Strolling into the karaka groves, we came upon a 
Maori wooden tomb, of which the front was carved 
with figures three feet high, grotesque and obscene. 
Gigantic eyes, hands bearing clubs, limbs without 
bodies, and bodies without limbs, were figured here 
and there among more perfect carvings, and the whole 
was of a character which the Maories of to-day disown 
as they do cannibalism, wishing to have these horrid 
things forgotten. The sudden rise of the Hau-IIau 
fanaticism within the last few years has shown us that 
the layer of civilization by which the old Maori habits 
are overlaid is thin indeed. 

The flags remained down all day, and in the after- 
noon we returned to the coast to shoot duck and 
puk^ko, a sort of moor-hen. It was not easy work, for 
the birds fell in the flax swamp, and the giant sword- 
like leaves of the Phormium tenax cut our hands as we 
pushed our way through its dense clumps and bushes, 
while some of the party sufifered badly from the sun: 
Maui, the Maories say, must have chained him up too 
near the earth. After dark, we could see the glare of 
the fires in the karaka groves, where the Maories were 
in council, and a government surveyor came in to 
report that he had met the dissentient Wanganuis 
riding fast toward the hills. 

In the morning, we were allowed to stay upon the 
coast till ten or eleven o'clock, when a messenger came 
down fruai Mr. Buller to call us to the pah : the coun- 
cil of the chiefs had again sat all night — for the Mao- 



PAREWANUI PAH, 313 

ries act upon their proverb that the eyes of great chiefs 
should know no rest — and Hunia had carried every- 
thing before him in the debate. 

As soon as the ring was formed, Hunia apologized 
for the pulling down of the Queen's flag; it had been 
done, he said, as a sign that the sale was broken off, 
not as an act of disrespect. Having, in short, had 
things entirely his own way, he was disposed to be 
extremely friendly both to whites and Maories. The 
sale, he said, must be brought about, or the "world 
would be on fire with an intertribal war. What is the 
good of the mountain-land ? There is nothing to eat 
but stones ; granite is a hard but not a strengthening 
food ; and women and land are the ruin of men." 

After congratulatory speeches from other chiefs, 
some of the older men treated us to histories of the 
deeds that had been wrought upon the block of land. 
Some of their speeches — notably those of Aperahama 
and Ihakara — were largely built up of legendary 
poems ; but the orators quoted the poetry as such only 
when in doubt how far the sentiments were those of 
the assembled people: when they were backed by the 
hum which denotes applause, they at one commenced 
with singular art to weave the poetry into that which 
was their own. 

As soon as the speeches were over, Hunia and Iha- 
kara marched up to the flagstaff carrying between 
them the deed-of-sale. Putting it down before Dr. 
Eeatherston, they shook hands with each other and 
with him, and swore that for the future there should 
be eternal friendship between their tribes. The 
deed was then signed by many hundred men and 
women, and Dr. Featherston started with Captain te 
Kepa, of the native contingent, to fetch the i25,000 



314 OREATEB BRITAIN. 

from Wanganui town, the Maories firing their rifles 
into the air as a salute. 

The Superintendent was no sooner gone than a kind 
of solemn grief seemed to come over the assembled 
people. After all, they were selling the. graves of 
their ancestors, they argued. The wife of Hamuera, 
seizing her husband's greenstone club, ran out from 
the ranks of the women, and began to intone an im- 
promptu song, which was echoed by the women, in a 
pathetic chorus chant: 

" The sun shines, but we quit our land : we abandon forever its forests, 
its mountains, its groves, its lakes, its shores. 

All its fair fisheries, here, under the bright sun, forever we re- 
nounce. 

It is a lovely day ; fair will be the children that are born to-day ; but 
we quit our land. 

In some parts there is forest; in others, the ground is skimmed over 
by the birds in their flight. 

Upon the trees there is fruit ; in the streams, fish ; in the fields, 
potatoes ; fern-roots in the bush ; but we quit our land." 

It is in chorus-speeches of this kind that David's 
psalms must have been recited by the Jews ; but on 
this occasion there was a good deal of mere acting in 
the grief, for the tribes had never occupied the land 
that they nOw sold. 

The next day. Dr. Featherston drove into camp sur- 
rounded by a brilliant cavalcade of Maori cavalry, 
amid much yelling and firing of pieces skyward. 
Hunia, in receiving him, declared that he would not 
have the money paid till the morrow, as the sun must 
shine upon the transfer of the lands. It would take 
his people all the night, he said, to work themselves 
up to the right pitch for a war-dance; so he sent down 
a strong guard to watch the money-chests, which had 
been conveyed to the missionary hut. The ^N'gatiapa 



FAREWANUI PAH. 315 

sentry posted inside the room was an odd cross between 
savagery and civilization; he wore the cap of the native 
contingent; and nothing else but a red kilt. He was 
armed with a short Wilkinson rifle, for which he had^ 
however, not a round of ammunition, his cartridges 
being Enfield and his piece unloaded. Barbarian or 
not, he seemed to like raw gin, with which some Eng- 
lishman had unlawfully and unfairly tempted him. 

In the morning, the money was handed over in the 
runanga-house, and a signet-ring presented to Hunia 
by Dr. Featherston in pledge of peace, and memory of 
the sale; but owing to the heat, we soon adjourned to 
the karaka grove, where Hunia made a congratulatory 
and somewhat boastful speech, offering his friendship 
and alliance to Dr. Featherston. 

The assembly was soon dismissed, and the chiefs 
withdrew to prepare for the grandest war-dance that 
had been seen for years, while a party went off to catch 
and kill the oxen that were to be "steamed" whole, 
just as our friends' fathers would have steamed us. 

A chief was detached by Hunia to guide us to a hill 
whence we commanded the whole glade. Ko sooner 
lad we taken our seats than the I^gatiraukawa to the 
number of a hundred fighting-men, armed with spears 
and led by a dozen women bearing clubs, marched out 
from their camp, and formed in column, their chiefs 
making speeches of exhortation from the ranks. After 
a pause, we heard the measured groaning of a distant 
haka, and looking up the glade, at the distance of a 
mile saw some twoscore Wanganui warriors jump- 
ing in perfect time, now to one side, now to the other, 
grasping their rifles by the barrel, and raising them as 
one man each time they jumped. Presently, bending 
one knee, but stiffening the other leg, they advanced, 
stepping together with a hopping movement, slapping 



316 GREATER BRITAIN. 

their hips and thighs, and shouting from the pahite, 
**Hough! Hough!" with fearful emphasis. 

A shout from the l^gatiraukawa hailed the approach 
of the Ngatiapa, who deployed from the woods some 
two hundred strong, all armed with Enfield rifles. 
They united with the Wanganuis, and marched slowly 
down with their rifles at the " charge," steadily singing 
war-songs. When within a hundred yards of the op- 
posing ranks, they halted, and sent in their challenge. 
The Ngatiraukawa and ^t^gatiapa heralds passed each 
other in silence, and each delivered his message to the 
hostile cliief. 

We could see that the allies were led by Hunia »n 
all the bravery of his war-costume. In his hair he 
wore a heron plume, and another was fastened near 
the muzzle of his short carbine ; his limbs were bare, 
but about his shoulders he had a pure white scarf of 
satin. His kilt was gauze-silk, of three colors — pink, 
emerald, and cherry — arranged in such a way as to 
show as much of the green as of the two other colors. 
The contrast, which upon a white skin would have 
been glaring in its ugliness, Avas perfect when backed 
by the nut-brown of Hunia's chest and legs. As he 
ran before his tribe, he was the ideal savage. 

The instant that the heralds had returned, a charge 
took place, the forces passing through each other's 
ranks as they do upon the stage, but with frightful 
yells. After this they formed two deep, in three com- 
panies, and danced the " musket-exercise w^ar-dance" 
m wonderful time, the women leading, thrusting out 
their tongues, and shaking their long pendant breasts. 
Among them was Hamu^ra's wife, standing drawn up 
to her full height, her limbs stiffened, her head thrown 
back, her mouth wide open and tongue protruding, 
her eyes rolled so as to show the white, and her arms 



PAREWANUI PAH. 317 

stretched out in front of her, as she slowly chanted. 
The illusion was perfect : she became for the time a 
mad prophetess ; yet all the frenzy was assumed at a 
whim, to be cast aside in half an hour. The shouts 
were of the same under-breath kind as in the haka, 
but they were aided by the sounds of horns and conch- 
shells, and from the number of men engaged the noise 
was this time terrible. After much fierce singing the 
musket-dance was repeated, with furious leaps and 
gestures, till the men became utterly exhausted, when 
the review was closed by a general discharge of rifles. 
Running with nimble feet, the dancers were soon back 
within their pahs, and the feast, beginning now, was, 
like a Russian banquet, prolonged till morning. 

It is not hard to understand the conduct of Lord 
Durham's settlers, who landed here in 1837. The 
friendly natives received the party with a war-dance, 
which had upon them such an effect that they imme- 
diately took ship for Australia, where they remained. 

The next day, when we called on Governor Hunia 
at his wahre to bid him farewell, before our departure 
for the capital, he made two speeches to us, which are 
worth recording as specimens of Maori oratory. Speak- 
ing through Mr. Buller, who had been kind enough to 
escort us to the Ngatiapa's wahre, Hunia said : 

"Hail, guests ! You have just now seen the settle- 
ment of a great dispute — the greatest of modern time* 

"This was a weighty trouble — a grave difficulty. 

" Many Pakehas have tried to settle it — in vain. For 
Petatone was it reserved to end it. I have said that 
great is our gratitude to Petatone. 

"If Petatone hath need of me in the future, I shall 
be there. If he climbs the lofty tree, I will climb it 
with him. If he scales high cliffs, I will scale them 

21* 



318 GEE ATE R BRITAIN, 

too. If Petatone needeth help, he shall have it ; and 
where he leads, there will I follow. 

"Such are the words of Hunia." 

To this speech one of us replied, explaining our 
position as guests from Britain. 

Hunia then began again to speak: 

*'0 my guests, a few days since when asked for a 
war-dance, I refused. I refused because my people 
were sad at heart. 

"We were loath to refuse our guests, but the tribes 
were grieved ; the peeple were sorrowful at heart. 

*' To-day we are happy, and the war-dance has taken 
place. 

*' my guests, when ye return to our great Queen, 
tell her that we will fight for her again as we have 
fought before. 

^'She is our Queen as well as your Queen — Queen 
of Maories and Queen of Pak^ha. 

" Should wars arise, we will take up our rifles, and 
march whithersoever she shall direct. 

" You have heard of the King movement. I was a 
Kingite ; but that did not prevent me fighting for the 
Queen — I and my chiefs. 

"My cousin, Wiremu, went to England, and saw 
our Queen. He returned. . . . 

"When you landed in this island, he was already 
dead. . . . 

" He died fighting for our Queen. 

"As he died, ice will die, if need be — I and all my 
chiefs. This do you tell our Queen. 

"I have said." 

This passage, spoken as Hunia spoke it, was one of 
noble eloquence and singular rhetoric art. The few 
first words about Wiremu were spoken in a half indif- 
ferent way; but there was a long pause before and 



THE MAORI ES. 319 

after the statement that he was dead, and a sinking of 
the voice when he related how Wiremu had died, fol- 
lowed by a burst of sudden fire in the "As he died, 
we will die — I and all my chiefs." 

After a minute or two, Hunia resumed: 

" This is another word. 

"We are all of us glad, to see you. 

" When we wrote to Petatone, we asked him that 
he would bring with him Pakehas from England and 
from Australia — Pakehas from all parts of the Queen's 
broad lands. 

"Pakehas who should return to tell the Queen that 
the Ngatiapa are her liegemen. 

"We are much rejoiced that you are here. May 
your heart rest here among us; but if you go once 
more to your English home, tell the people that we are 
Petatone's faithful subjects and the Queen's. 

"I have said." 

After pledging Hunia in a cup of wine, we returned 
to our temporary home. 



CHAPTER Y. 

THE MAORIES. 

Parting with my companions (who were going north- 
ward) in order that I might return to Wellington, 
and thence take ship to Taranaki, I started at day- 
break on a lovely morning to walk by the sea-shore to 
Otaki. As I left the bank of the Manawatu River for 
the sands. Mount Egmont near Taranaki, and Mounts 
Ruapehu and Tongariro, in the center of the island, 



320 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

hung their great snow domes in the soft blue of the 
sky behind me, and seemed to have parted fi'om their 
bases. 

I soon passed through the flax-swamp where we for 
days had shot the pukeko, and coming out upon thes. 
wet sands, which here are glittering and full of tLe> 
Taranaki steel, I took off boots and socks, and trudged 
the whole distance barefoot, regardless of the morrow. 
It was hard to walk without crunching with the heel 
shells which would be thought rare at home, and here 
and there charming little tern and other tiny sea-fowl 
flew at me, and all but pecked my eyes out for coming 
near their nests. 

During the day, I forded two large rivers and small 
streams innumerable, and swam the Ohau, where Dr. 
Featherston last week lost his dog-cart in the quick- 
sands, but I managed to reach Otaki before sunset, in 
time to revel in a typical !N'ew Zealand view. The 
foreground was composed of ancient sand-hills, covered 
with the native flax, with the deliciously-scenteci 
Manuka ti-tree, brilliant in white flower, and with 
giant fern, tuft-grass, and tussac. Farther inland was 
the bush, evergreen, bunchlike in its foliage, and so 
overladen with parasitic vegetation, that the true leaves 
were hidden by usurpers, or crushed to death in the 
folds of snakelike creepers. The view was bounded 
by bush-clad mountains, rosy with the sunset tints. 

Otaki is Archdeacon Iladtield's church-settlement 
of Christian Maories; but of late there have been signs 
of wavering in the tribes, and I found Major Edwai des, 
who had been with us at Parewanui, engaged in hold- 
ing, for the government, a runanga of Hau-Haus, or 
Antichristian Maories, in the Otaki Pah. Some of 
these fellows had lately held a meeting, and had them- 
selves rebaptized, but this time out of instead of into 



THE MAORIES. 321 

the cliurch. They received fresh names, and are said 
to have politely invited the archdeacon to perform the 
ceremony. 

Maori Church of Englandism has proved a failure. 
A dozen native clergymen are, it is true, supported in 
comfort by their countrymen, but the^ tribes woukV 
support a hundred such, if necessary, rather than give- 
up the fertile *' reservations," such as that of Otaki, 
which their pretended Christianity has secured. There 
is much in the Maori that is tiger-like, and it is in the 
blood, not to be drawn out of it by a fewyears of play- 
ing at Christianity. 

The labors of the missionaries have been great, their 
earnestness and devotion unsurpassed. Up to the day 
of the outbreak of Hau-Hauism, their influence with 
the natives was thought to be enormous. The entire 
Maori race had been baptized, thousands of natives 
had attended the schools, hundreds had become com- 
municants and catechists. In a day the number of 
native Christians was reduced from thirty thousand to 
some hundreds. Right and left the tribes flocked to 
the bush, deserting mission stations, villages, herds, 
and fields. Those few who dared not go were there in 
spirit ; all sympathized, if not with the Hau-Hau move- 
ment, at least with Kingism. The archdeacon and 
his brethren of the holy calling were at their wits' 
ends. I^ot only did Christianity disappear : civilization 
itself accompanied religion in her flight, and habits of 
bloodshed and barbarity, unknown since the nominal 
renunciation of idolatry, in a day returned. The fall 
was terrible, but it went to show that the apparent 
success had been fictitious. The natives had built mills 
and owned ships ; they had learnt husbandry and cat- 
tle-breeding; they had invested money, and put acre 
to acre, and house to house; but their moral could 



322 G BEATER BRITAIN. 

hardly have kept pace with their material, or even with 
their mental gains. 

A magistrate, who knows the Maories well, told me 
that their Christianity is only on the surface. He one 
day asked Matene te Whiwhi, a Ngatiraukawa chief, 
"Which would you soonest eat, Matene — pork, beef, 
or Ngatiapa?" Matene answered, with a turn up of 
his eyes, "Ah ! I'm a Christian !" " Never mind that 
to me, you know," said the Englishman. " The flesh 
of the Ngatiapa is sweet," said Matene, with a smack 
of the lips that was distinctly audible. The settlers 
tell you that when the Maories go to war, they use up 
their Bibles for gun-w^adding, and then come on the 
missionaries for a fresh supply. 

The Polynesians, when Christianity is first presented 
to them, embrace it with excitement and enthusiasm; 
the '• new religion " spreads like wildfire ; the success 
of the teachers is amazing. A few years, however, 
show a terrible change. The natives find that all white 
men are not missionaries; that if one set of English- 
men deplore their licentiousness, there are others to 
back them in it; that Christianity requires self-re- 
straint. As soon as the first flare of the new religion 
is over it commences to decline, and in some cases it 
expires. The story of Christianity in Hawaii, in Ota- 
heite, and in New Zealand, has been much the same: 
among the Tahitians it was crushed by the relapse of 
the converts into extreme licentiousness; among the 
Maories it was put down by the sudden rise of the 
Hau-Hau fanaticism. A return to a better state of 
things has in each case followed, but the missionaries 
work now in a depressed and saddened way, which 
contrasts sternly with the exultation that inspired them 
before the fresh outbreak of the demon which they 
believed they had exorcised. They reluctantly admit 



THE MAORIES. 323 

that the Polynesians are fickle as well as gross; not 
only licentious, but untrustworthy. There is, they 
will tell you, no country where it is so eas}^ to plant or 
80 hard to maintain Christianity. 

The Maori religion is that of all the Polynesians— a 
vague polytheism, which in their poems seems now 
and then to approach to pantheism. The forest glades, 
the mountain rocks, the stormy shores, all swarm with 
fairy sii]gers, and with throngs of gnomes and elves. 
The happy laughing islanders have a heaven, but no 
hell in their mytholog}^; of ''sin'^ they have no con- 
ception. Hau-IIauism is not a Polynesian creed, but 
a political and religious system based upon the earlier 
books of the Old Testament; even the cannibalism 
which was added was not of the Maori kind. The 
Indians of Chili ate human flesh for pleasure and va- 
riety; those of Virginia were cannibals only on state 
occasions, or in religious ceremonials; but the Maories 
seem originally to have been driven to man-eating by 
sheer want of food. Since Cook left pigs upon the 
islands, the excuse has been wanting, and the practice 
has consequently ceased. As revived by the Hau- 
Haus, the man-eating was of a ceremonial nature, and, 
like the whole of the observances of the Hau-Hau 
fanaticism, an inroad upon ancient Maori customs. 

There is one great difference which severs the Maories 
from the other Polynesians. In IN'ew Zealand caste is 
unknown; every Maori is a gentleman or a slave. 
Chiefs are elected by the popular voice, not, indeed, 
by a show of hands, but by a sort of general agreement 
of the tribe ; but the chief is a political, not a social 
superior. In the windy climate of New Zealand men 
can push themselves to the front too surely by their 
energy and toil, to remain socially in an inferior class. 
Caste is impossible where the climate necessitates lie- 



324 GREATER BRITAIN. 

tivity and work. The Maories, too, we should remem- 
ber, are an immigrant race; probably no high-caste 
men came with tliem — all started from equal rank. 

Like the Tongans, the Maories pay great reverence 
to their well-born women ; slave women are of no ac- 
count. The Friendly Islanders exclude both man and 
woman slave from the Future Life ; but the Maori 
E,angatira not only admits his followers to heaven, but 
his wife to counciL A Maori chief is as obedient to 
the warlike biddings, and as grateful for the praising 
glance or smile of his betrothed, as a planter-cavalier 
of Carolina, or a Cretan volunteer ; and even the ladies 
of lSQ\Y Orleans cannot have gone further than the 
wives of Hunia and Ihakara in spurring on the men to 
war. The Maori Andromaches outdo their European 
sisters, for they themselves proceed to battle, and ani- 
mate their Hectors by songs and shouts. Even the 
scepter of tribal rule — the greenstone meri^ or ro^'al 
club — is often intrusted to them by their warrior 
husbands, and used to lead the war-dance or the 
charge. 

The delicacy of treatment shown by the Maories 
toward their women may go far to account for the ab- 
sence of contempt for the native race among the Eng- 
lish population. An Englishman's respect for the sex 
is terribly shocked when he sees a woman staggering 
under the weight of the wigwam and the children of a 
''brave," who stalks behind her through the streets of 
Austin, carrj'ing his rifles and his pistols, but not 
another ounce, unless in the shape of a thong with 
w^hich to hasten the squaw's steps. What wonder if 
the men who sit by smoking while their wives totter 
under basketsful of mould on the boulevard works at 
Delhi are called lazy scoundrels by the press of the 
Iforthwest, or if the Shoshones, who eat the bread ot 



THE MAOBIES. 325 

idleness themselves, and Lire out their wives to the 
Pacific Railroad Company, are looked upon as worse 
than dogs in Nevada, where the thing is done ? It is 
the. New Zealand native's treatment of his wife that 
makes it possible for an honest Englishman to respect 
or love an honest Maori. 

In general, the newspaper editors and idle talkers of 
the frontier districts of a colony in savage lands speak 
with mingled ridicule and contempt of the men with 
whom they daily struggle ; at best, they see in them 
no virtue but ferocious bravery. The Kansas and 
Colorado papers call Indians "fiends," "devils," or 
dismiss them laughingly in peaceful times as *' bucks," 
whose lives are worth, perhaps, a bufl:alo's, but who 
are worthy of notice only as potential murderers or 
thieves. Such, too, is the tone of the Australian press 
concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of Queensland 
or Tasmania. Far otherwise do the New Zealand 
papers speak of the Maori warriors. They may some- 
times call it-hem grasping, overreaching traders, or un- 
derrate ti&ffjir capability of receiving civilization of a 
European Mnd, but never do they afiect to think them 
less than 'men, or to advocate the employment toward 
them of ^Pleasures which would be repressed as infamous 
if applied to brutes. We should, I think, see in this 
peculiarity of conduct, not evidence of the existence in 
New Zealand of a spirit more catholic and tolerant 
toward savage neighbors than that which the English 
race displays in Australia or America, but rather a 
tribute to the superiority in virtue, intelligence, and 
nobility of mind possessed by the Maori over the Ked 
Indian or the Australian Black. 

It is not only in their treatment of their women that 
the Maories show their chivalry. One of the most 
noble traits of this great people is their habit of "pro- 

28 



S2G GBEATER BBITAIN. 

claiming" the districts in which lies the cause of war 
as the sole tightlng-ground, and never touching their 
enemies, however defenseless, when found elsewhere. 
Euro])ean nations might take a lesson from I^ew Zea- 
land Maories in this and other points. 

The Maories are apt at learning, marry, and, unlike 
other Polynesians, trustworthy, hut also, unlike them, 
mercenary. At the time of the Manawatu sale, old 
Aperahama used to write to Dr. Featherston almost 
every day: "O Petatone, let the price of the hlock be 
£9,999,999 195. 9c?.," the mysteries of eleven pence three 
farthings being far beyond his comprehension. The 
Maories have, too, a royal magnificence in their ideas 
of gifts and grants — witness te Heke's bid of 100,000 
acres of land for Governor Fitzroy's head, in answer 
to the offer, by the governor, of a small price for his. 

The praises of the Maories have been sung by so 
many writers, and in so many keys, that it is necessary 
to keep it distinctly before us that ^hey are mere sav- 
ages, though brave, shrewd men. There is an Eastern 
civilization — that of China and Ilindostan — distinct 
fi'om that of Europe, and ancient be3ond all count; in 
this the Maories have no share. ISTo true Hindoo, no 
Arab, no Chinaman, has suffered change in one tittle 
of his dress or manners from contact with the Western 
races; of this essential conservatism there is in the 
JSTew Zealand savage not a trace. William Thompson, 
the Maori " king-maker,*' used to dress as any English- 
man; Maories on board our ships wear the uniform of 
the able-bodied seamen ; Governor Hunia has ridden 
as a gentleman-rider in a steeple-chase, equipped in 
jockey dress. 

Savages though they be, in irregular warfare vj e are 
not their match. At the end of 1865, we had of regu- 
lars and militia seventeen thousand men under arms 



THE MAORIES. 327 

ill the Kortli Island of N"ew Zealand, including no less 
than twelve rei^iments of the line at their " war 
strength," and yet our generals were despondent as to 
their chance of finally defeating the warriors of a people 
which — men, women, and children — numbered but 
thirty thousand souls. 

Men have sous^ht far and wide for the reasons which ' 
led to our defeats in the I^ew Zealand wars. We were 
defeated by the Maories, as the Austrians by tlie 
Prussians, and the French by the English in old times 
— because the victors were the better men. IN'ot the 
braver men, when both sides were brave alike ; not 
the stronger ; not, perhaps, taking the average of our 
ollicers and men, the more intelligent; but capable of 
quicker movement, able to subsist on less, more crafty, 
more skilled in the thousand tactics of the bush. 
Aided by their women, who, when need was, them- 
selves would lead the charge, and who at all times dug 
their fern-root and caught their tish ; marching where 
our regiments could not follow, they had, as have the 
Indians in America, the choice of time and place for 
their attacks, and while we were crawling about our 
military roads upon the coast, incapable of traversing 
a mile of bush, the Maories moved securely and secretly 
from one end to the other of the island. Arms they had, 
ammunition they could steal, and blockade' was useless 
with enemies who live on fern-root. When they found 
that we burnt their pahs, they ceased to build them; 
that was all. When we brought up howitzers, they 
went where no howitzers could follow. It should not 
be hard even for our pride to allow that such enemies 
were, man for man, in their own lands our betters. 

All nations fond of horses, it has been said, flourish 
and succeed. The Maories love horses and ride well. 
All races that delight in sea are equally certain to pros- 



328 GREATER BRITAIN. 

per, empirical philosophers will tell us. The Maori ea 
own ships by the score, and serve as sailors whenever 
they get a chance: as deep-sea tishermen they have no 
equals. Their fondness for draughts shows mathe- 
matical capacity; in truthfulness they possess the tirst 
of virtues. They are shrewd, thrifty ; devoted friends, 
brave men. With all this, they die. 

" Can you stay the surf which beats on Wanganui 
shore V say the Maories of our progress; and, of them- 
selves : " We are gone — like the ??ioa." 



CHAPTER YI. 

THE TWO FLIES. 

" As the Pakeha fly has driven out the Maori fly; 
As the Pakeha grass has killed the Maori grass ; 
As the Pakeha rat has shiin the Maori rat ; 
As the Pakeha clover has starved the Maori fern, 
So will the Pakeha destroy the Maori." 

These are the mournful words of a well-known 
Maori song. 

That the English daisy, the white clover, the common 
thistle, the chamomile, the oat, should make their way 
rapidly in New Zealand, and put down the native 
plants, is in no way strange. If the Maori grasses 
that have till lately held undisturbed possession of the 
New Zealand soil, require for their nourishment the 
substances A, B, and C, while the English clover 
needs A, B, and D ; from the nature of things A and 
B will be the coarser earths or salts, existing in larger 



THE TWO FLIES. 329 

quantities, not easily losing vigor and noxirisbing force, 
and recruiting their energies from the decay of the 
very plant that feeds on them ; but C and D will be the 
more ethereal, the more easily destroyed or wasted 
substances. The Maori grass, having sucked nearly 
the whole of C from the soil, is in a weakly state, when 
in comes the English plant, and, finding an abundant 
store of untouched D, thrives accordingly, and crushes 
down the Maori. 

The positions of flies and grasses,, of plants and in- 
sects, are, however, not the same. Adapted by nature 
to the infinite variety of soils and climates, there are 
an infinite number of different plants and animals; 
but whereas the plant depends upon both soil and 
climate, the animal depends chiefly upon climate, and 
little upon soil — except so far as his home or his food 
themselves depend on soil. l!Tow^, while soil wears out, 
climate does not. The climate in the long run remains 
the same, but certain apparently trifling constituents 
of the soil will wholly disappear. The result of this 
is, that while pigs may continue to thrive in New Zea- 
land forever and a day, Dutch clover (without manure) 
will only last a given and calculable time. 

The case of the flies is plain enough. The Maori 
and the English fly live on the same food, and require 
about the same amount of warmth and moisture : the 
one which is best fitted to the common conditions will 
gain the day, and drive out the other. The English 
fly has had to contend not only against other English 
flies, but against every fly of temperate climates: we 
having traded with every land, and brought the flies 
of every clime to Engla^ad. The English fly is the 
best possible fly of the whole world, and will naturally 
beat down and exterminate, or else starve out, the 
merely provincial Maori ^y. If a great singer — to find 

28* 



330 GHEATER BRITAIN. 

wliom for the London stage the world has been ran- 
sacked — should be led by the foible of the moment to 
sing for gain in an unknown village, where on the 
same night a rustic tenor was attempting to sing his 
best, the London tenor would send the provincial sup- 
perless to bed. So it is with the English and Maori fly. 

IS^atural selection is being conducted by nature in 
New Zealand on a grander scale than any we have 
contemplated, for the object of it here is man. In 
America, in Australia, the white man shoots or poisons 
his red or black fellow, and exterminates him through 
the workings of superior knowledge ; but in New Zea- 
land it is peacefully, and without extraordinary advant- 
ages, that the Pak^ha beats his Maori brother. 

That which is true of our animal and vegetable pro- 
ductions is true also of our man. The English fly, 
grass, and man, they and their progenitors before them, 
have had to fight for life against their fellows. The 
Englishman, bringing into his country from the parts 
to which he trades all manner of men, of grass seeds, 
and of insect germs, has filled his land with every kind 
of living thing to which his soil or climate will afibrd 
support. Both old inhabitants and interlopers have to 
maintain a struggle which at once crushes and starves 
out of life every weakly plant, man, or insect, and for- 
tifies the race by continual buiFe tings. The plants of 
civilized man are generally those which will grow best 
in the greatest variety of soils and climates; but in 
any case, the English fauna and flora are peculiarly 
fitted to succeed at our antipodes, because the climates 
of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost the same, 
and our men, flies, and plants — the ''pick" of the 
whole world — have not even to encounter the diffi- 
culties of acclimatization in their struggle against 
the weaker growths indigenous to the soil. 



THE TWO FLIES. 331 

I^ature's work in Kew Zealand is not the same as 
that which she is quickly doing in North America, in 
Tasmania, in Queensland. It is not merely that a 
hunting and fighting people is being replaced by an 
agricultural and pastoral people, and must farm or 
die : the Maori does farm ; Maori chiefs own villages, 
build houses, which they let to European settlers; we 
have here Maori sheep-farmers, Maori ship-owners, 
Maori mechanics, Maori soldiers, Maori rough-riders, 
Maori sailors, and even Maori traders. There is no- 
thing which the average Englishman can do which the 
average Maori cannot be taught to do as cheaply and 
as well. Kevertheless, the race dies out. The Eed 
Indian dies because he cannot tkrrn ; the Maori farms, 
and dies. 

There are certain special features about this advance 
of the birds, beasts, and men of Western civilization. 
When the first white man landed in Il^ew Zealand, all 
the native quadrupeds save one, and nearly all the 
birds and river-fishes, were extinct, though we have 
their bones, and traditions of their existence. The 
Maories themselves were dying out. The moa and 
dinoris were both gone ; there were few insects, and 
no reptiles. ^'The birds die because the Maories, their 
companions, die," is the native saying. Yet the climate 
is singularly good, and food for beast and bird so plen- 
tiful that Captain Cook's pigs have planted colonies of 
"wild boars" in every part of the islands, and English 
pheasants have no sooner been imported than they 
have commenced to swarm in ev(3fy jungle. Even the 
Pakeha flea has come over in the ships, and wonder- 
fully has he thriven. 

The terrible want of food for men that formerly char- 
acterized New Zealand has had its effects upon the 
habits of the Maori race. Australia has no native 



332 GREATER BRITAIN. 

fruit trees worthy cultivation, although in the whole 
world there is no such climate and soil for fruits; still, 
Australia has kangarox)s and other quadrupeds. The 
Lad rones wei"^ destitute of quadrupeds, and of birds, 
except the turtle-dove; but in the warm damp climate 
fruits grew, sufficient to support in comfort a dense 
population. In New Zealand the windy cold of the 
wintei*s causes a need for somethino: of a tousrher fiber 
than the banana or the fern-root. There beincr no 
native beasts, the want was supplied by human flesh, 
and war, furnishing at once food and the excitement 
which the chase supplies to peoples that have animals 
to hunt, became the occupation of the Maories. Hence 
in some degree the depopulation of the land ; but 
other causes exist, bv the side of which cannibalism is 
as nothing. 

The British government has been less guilty tlian 
is commonly believed as regards the destruction of the 
Maories. Since the original misdeed of the annexation 
of the iv^les, we have done the Maories no serious 
wrong. "VVe recognized the claim of a handful of na- 
tives to the soil of a country as large as Great Britain, 
of not one-hundredth part of which had they ever 
made the smallest use ; and, disregarding the fact that 
our occupation of the coast was the very event that 
gave the land its value, we have insisted on buying 
every acre from the tribe. Allowing title by conquest 
to the !N"gatiraukawa, as I saw at Pare wan ui Pah, we 
refuse to claim even the lands we conquered from the 
"Kingites." 

The Maories have always been a village people, till- 
ing a little land round their pahs, but incapable of 
making any use of the great pastures and wheat coun- 
tries which they "own." Had we at first constituted 
native reserves, on the American system, we might, 



THE TWO FLIES. 333 

without any fighting, and without any more rapid de- 
struction of the natives than that which is taking place, 
have gradually cleared and brought into the market 
nearly the whole country, which now has to be pur- 
chased at enormous prices, and at the continual risk 
of war. 

As it is, the record of our dealings with the Queen's 
native subjects in New Zealand has been almost free 
from stain, but if we have not committed crimes, we 
have certainly not failed to blunder: our treatment of 
William Thompson was at the best a grave mistake. 
If ever there lived a patriot he was one, and through 
him we might have ruled in peace, the Maori race. 
Instead of receiving the simplest courtesy from a people 
which in India showers honors upon its puppet kings 
and rajahs, he underwent fresh insults each time that 
he entered an English town or met a white magistrate 
or subaltern, and he died, while I was in the colonies — 
according to Pakdha physicians, of liver complaint; 
according to the Maories, of a broken heart. 

At Parewanui and Otaki, I remarked that the half- 
breeds are iine fellows, possessed of much of the no- 
bility of both the ancestral races, while the women are 
tamed for grace and loveliness. In miscegenation it 
would have seemed that there was a chance for the 
Maori, who, if destined to die, would at least have left 
many of his best features of body and mind to live in 
the mixed race, but here combes in the prejudice of 
blood, with which we have already met in the case of 
the negroes and Chinese. Morality has so far gained 
ground as greatly to check the spread of permanent 
illegitimate connections with iiative women, while 
pride prevents intermarriage. The numbers of the 
half-breeds are not upon the increase : a few fresh mar- 
riages supply the vacancies that come of death, but 



334 GREATER BRITAIN. 

thore is no progress, no sign of the creation of a vig- 
orous mixed race. There is something more in this 
than foolish pride, however ; there is a secret at the 
hottom at once of the cessation of mixed marriages 
and of the dwindling of tlie pure Maori race, and it is 
the utter viciousneas of the native girls. The universal 
unchastity of the unmarried women, "Christian" as 
well as heathen, would be sufficient to destroy a race 
of gods. The story of the Maories is that of the Tahi- 
tians, and is written in the decorations of every gate- 
post or rafter in their pahs. 

We are more distressed at the present and future of 
the Maories than they are themselves. For all our 
greatness, we pity not the Maories more profoundly 
than they do us when, ascribing our morality to calcu- 
lation, they bask in the sunlight, and are happy in 
their gracelessness. After all, virtue and arithmetic 
come from one Greek root. 



CHAPTER YIL 

THE PACIFIC. 

Closely resembling Great Britain in situation, size, 
and climate, l^ew Zealand is often styled by the col- 
onists *'The Britain of the South," and many affect to 
believe that her future is destined to be as brilliant as 
has been the past of her mother country. With the 
exaggeration of phrase to which the English !N'ew Zea- 
landers are prone, they prophesy a marvelous here- 
after for the whole Pacific, in which New Zealand, as 



THE PACIFIC. 335 

the carrj'ing and manufacturing country, is to play the 
foremost part, the Australias following obediently in 
her train. 

Even if the differences of Separatists, Provincialists, 
and Centralists should be healed, the future prosperity 
of New Zealand is by no means secure. Her gold 
yield is only about a fifth of that of California or Vic- 
toria. Her area is not sufficient to make her powerful 
as an agricultural or pastoral country, unless she comes 
to attract manufactures and carrying trade from afar, 
and the prospect of ItTew Zealand succeeding in this 
effort is but small. Her rivers are almost useless for 
manufacturing purposes owing to their floods; the 
timber supply of all her forests is not equal to that of 
a single county in the State of Oregon; her coal is 
inferior in quality to that of Vancouver Island, in quan- 
tity to that of Chili, in both respects to that of New 
South Wales. The harbors of New Zealand are upon 
tlie eastern coasts, but the coal is chiefly upon the 
other side, where the river bars make trade impos- 
sible. 

The coal that has been found at the Bay of Islands 
is said to be plentiful and of good quality, and may be 
made largely available for steamers on the coast; the 
steel sand of Taranaki, smelted by the use of petro- 
leum, also found within the province, may become of 
value; her own wool, too, New Zealand will doubtless 
one day manufacture into cloth and blankets; but 
these are comparatively trifling matters : New Zealand 
may become rich and populous without being the great 
power of the Pacific, or even of the South. 

The climate of the North Island is winterless, moist, 
and warm, and its effects are already seen in a certain 
want of enterprise shown by the government and set- 
tlers. I remarked that the mail steamers which leave 



336 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Wellington almost everyday are invariably *' detained 
for dispatches:" it looks as thongh the officers of the 
colonial or imperial government commence to write 
their letters only when the hour for the sailing of the 
ship has come. An Englishman visiting New Zealand 
was asked in my presence how long his business at 
"Wanganui would keep him in the town. His answer 
■was : ** In London it would take me half an hour ; so 
I suppose about a week — about a week!" 

In Java, and the other islands of the Indian archi- 
pelago, w^e lind examples of the eft'ect of the supiae- 
ness of dwellers in the tropics upon the economic 
position of their countries. Many of the Indian isles 
possess both coal and cheap labor, but have failed to 
become manufacturing communities on a large scale 
only because the natives have not the energy requisite 
for the direction of factories and workshops, while 
European foremen have to be paid enormous wages, 
and, losing their spirit in the damp, unchanging cli- 
mate of the islands, soon become more indolent than 
the natives. 

The position of the various stores of coal in th 
Pacilic is of extreme importance as an index to th 
future distribution of power in that portion of thei 
world ; but it is not enough to know where coal is to 
be found without looking also to the quantity, quality, 
cheapness of labor, and facility for transport. In China 
(in the Si Shan district) and in Borneo, there are ex-j 
tensive coal iields, but they lie "the wrong way" for 
trade. On the other hand, the Californian coal — at 
Monte Diablo, San Diego, and Monterey — lies well, 
but is bad in quality. The Talcahuano bed in Chili 
is not good enough for ocean steamers, but might be 
made use of for manufactures, although Chili has but 
little iron. Tasmania has good coal, but in no great 



THE PACIFIC. 337 

qaantity, and the beds nearest to the coast are formed 
of inferior anthracite. The three countries of the Pa- 
cific which must, for a time at least, rise to manufac- 
turing greatness, are Japan, Vancouver Island, and 
New South Wales, but which of these will become 
wealthiest and most powerful depends mainly on the 
amount of coal which they respectively possess so 
situated as to be cheaply raised. The dearness of labor 
under which Vancouver suffers will be removed by the 
opening of the Pacific Railroad, but for the present 
New South "Wales has the cheaper labor; and upon 
her shores at Newcastle are abundant stores of a coal 
of good quality for manufacturing purposes, although 
for sea use it burns "dirtily," and too fast, the colony 
possesses also ample beds of iron, copper, and lead. 
Japan, as far as can be at present seen, stands before 
Vancouver and New South Wales in almost every 
point: she has cheap labor, good climate, excellent 
harbors, and abundant coal ; cotton can be grown upon 
her soil, and this, and that of Queensland, she can 
manufacture and export to America and to the East. 
Wool from California and from the Australias might 
bd carried to her to be worked, and her rise to com- 
irercial greatness has already commenced with the 
passage of a law allowing Japanese workmen to take 
service with European capitalists in the "treaty-ports." 
A^hether Japan or New South Wales is destined to 
become the great wool-manufacturing country, it is 
certain that fleeces will not long continue to be sent 
lalf round the world — from Australia to England — to 
be worked, and then round the other half back from 
England to Australia, to be sold as blankets. 

The future of the Pacific shores is inevitably bril- 
liant; but it is not New Zealand, the center of the 
^ater hemisphere, which will occupy the position that 

29 



338 GREATER BRITAIN. 

England has taken in the Atlantic, but some country 
such as Japan or Vancouver, jutting out into the ocean 
from Asia or from America, as England juts out from 
Europe. If I^ew South Wales usui^ps the position, it 
will be not from her geographical situation, but from 
the manufacturing advantages she gains by the posses- 
sion of vast mineral wealth. 

The political power of America in the Pacific ap- 
pears predominant : the Sandwich Islands are all but 
annexed, Japan all but ruled by her, while the occupa- 
tion of British Columbia is but a matter of time, ind 
a Mormon descent upon the Marquesas is already 
planned. The relations of America and Australia vrill 
be the key to the future of the South. 

3|c 4s 4e * 3|e * 

On the 26th of December I left l^ew Zealand hr 
Australia. 



APPEHDIX. 



A MAORI DINNER. 



For those who would make trial of Maori dishes, here is a 
native bill-of-fare, such as can be imitated in the South of 
England: 

HAKARI MAORI— A MAORI FEAST. 



BILL-OF-FARE. 

SOUP. 
KoTA KoTA . Any shell-fish. 

FISH. 

Inanoa .... Whitebait (boiled in milk, with leeks). 
PiHARAU . . . Lamprey (stewed). 
Tuna .... Eels (steamed). 

MADE-DISHES. 

PuKtKo . . . . . . Moor-hen (steamed). 

KouRA Craw-fish (boiled). 

Tui Tui Thrush (roast). 

Kto^u Pigeon (baked in clay). 

ROAST. 

Pooka Pork (short pig). 

(339) 



340 APPENDIX. 

GAME. 

PARtRA .... Wild Duck (roasted on embers). 

VEGETABLES. 

Paukena Pumpkin. 

Kamu Kamu Vegetable Marrow. 

Kaputi Cabbage (steamed). 

KuMATA Sweet Potatoes. 

SWEETS. 

Tataramoa . . Cranberries (steamed). 

Tana .... Damsons (steamed with sugar). 

DESSERT. 

Karamu Currants. 



Pikakarika, Dec. 18€6. 



END OF yOL. I. 



GREATER BRITAIN. 



A RECOBD OF TRAVEL 



IS 



ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES 



DURING 1866-7. 



BY 



CHARLES WEE'T WORTH DILKE. 



YOL. II. 

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS, 




PHILADELPHIA : 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

LONDON: MiNCMILLAN & CO. 
1869. 



CatW/ 1> 



$ 

^ 



P^RT III. 

AUSTRALIA. 



TOL. U. I* (5) 



GREATER BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER I. 

SYDNEY. 



At early ligbt on Christmas-day, I put off from 
shor6 in one of those squalls for which Port Nichol- 
son, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A boat which 
started from the ship at the same time as mine from 
the land, was upset, but in such shallow water that 
the passengers were saved, though they lost a portion 
of their baggage. As we flew toward the mail steamer, 
the Kaikoura, the harbor was one vast sheet of foam, 
and columns of spray were being whirled in the air, 
and borne away far inland upon the gale. We had 
placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who said that he 
could steer, but, as we reached the steamer's side, 
instead of luffing-up, he suddenly put the helm hard 
a-weather, and we shot astern of her, running violently 
before the wind, although our treble-reefed sail was 
by this time altogether down. A rope was thrown us 
from a coal hulk, and, catching it, we were soon on 
board, and spent our Christmas walking up and down 
her deck on the slippery black dust, and watching the 
effects of the gale. After some hours the wind mod- 
erated, and I reached the Kaikoura just before she 
sailed. While we were steaming out of the harbor 

(1) 



8 GREATER BRITAIN. 

through the boil of waters that marks the position of 
the submarine crater, I found that there was but one 
other passenger for Australia to share with me the 
services of ten officers and ninety men, and the accom- 
modations of a ship of 1500 tons. *' Serious prepara 
tions and a large ship for a mere voyage from one Aus- 
tralasian colony to another," I felt inclined to say, but 
during the voyage and my first week in ]S"ew South 
Wales I began to discover that in England we are 
given over to a singular delusion as to the connection 
of Kew Zealand and Australia. 

Australasia is a term much used at home to express 
the whole of our Antipodean possessions ; in the col- 
onies themselves the name is almost unknown, or, if 
used, is meant to embrace Australia and Tasmania, 
not Australia and New Zealand. The only reference 
to iN^ew Zealand, except in the way of foreign news, 
that I ever found in an Australian paper, was a con* 
gratulatory paragraph on the amount of the ]S"ew Zea* 
land debt ; the only allusion to Australia that I ever 
detected in the "Wellington Independent was in a glance 
at the future of the colony, in which the editor pre- 
dicted the advent of a time when iN'ew Zealand would 
be a great naval nation, and her fleet engaged in bomi 
barding Melbourne, or levying a contribution upon 
Sydney. 

Kew Zealand, though a change for the better is at 
hand, has hitherto been mainly an aristocratic country; 
New South Wales and Victoria mainly democratic; 
Had Australia and New Zealand been close together^ 
instead of as far apart as Africa and South America, 
there could have been no political connection between 
them so long as the traditions of their first settlement 
endured. • 

Not only is the name ^^Australasia "politically mean- 



SYDNEY, 9 

ingless, but geographically incorrect, for IS'ew Zealand 
and Australia are as completely separated from each 
other as Great Britain and Massachusetts. I^To prom- 
ontory of Australia runs out to within 1000 miles of 
any New Zealand cape ; the distance between Sydney 
and Wellington is 1400 miles; from Sydney to Auck- 
land about the same. The distance from the nearest 
point of New Zealand of Tasman's peninsula, which 
itself projects somewhat from Tasmania, is greater than 
that of London from Algiers: from Wellington to 
Sydney, opposite ports, is as for as from Manchester 
to Iceland, or from Africa to Brazil. 

The sea that lies between the two great countries of 
the south is not, like the Central or North Pacific, a 
sea bridged with islands, ruffled with trade winds, 
favorable to sailing ships, or overspread with a calm 
that permits the presence of light-draught paddle 
steamers. The seas which separate Australia from 
New Zealand are cold, bottomless, without islands, 
torn by Arctic currents, swept by polar gales, and trav- 
ersed in all weathers by a mountainous swell. After 
the gale of Christmas-day we were blessed with a con- 
tinuance of light breezes on our way to Sydney, but 
never did we escape the long rolling hills of seas that 
seemed to surge up from the Antarctic pole: our screw 
was as often out of as in the water ; and in a fast new 
ship we could scarcely average nine knots an hour 
throughout the day. The ship which had brought the 
last Australian mail to Wellington before we sailed 
was struck by a sea which swept her from stem to 
stern, and filled her cabin two feet deep, and this in 
December, which here is midsummer, and answers to 
our July. Not only is the intervening ocean wide and 
cold, but New Zealand presents to Australia a rugged 
coast guarded by reefs and bars, and backed by a 



10 GREATER BRITAIN. 

snowy range, while she turns toward Polynesia and 
America all her ports and bays. 

No two countries in the world are so wholly distinct 
as Australia and New Zealand. The islands of New 
Zealand are inhabited by Polynesians, the Australian 
continent by negroes. New Zealand is ethnological ly 
nearer to America, Australia to Africa, than New Zea- 
land to Australia. 

If we turn from ethnology to scenery and climate, 
the countries are still more distinct. New Zealand is 
one of the groups of volcanic islands that stud the 
Pacific throughout its whole extent; tremendous cliffs 
surround it on almost every side ; a great mountain 
chain runs through both islands from north to south; 
hot springs abound, often close to glaciers and eternal 
snows; earthquakes are common, and active volcanoes 
not unknown. The New Zealand climate is damp and 
windy; the laud is covered in most parts with a tangled 
jungle of tree-ferns, creepers, and parasitic plants; 
water never fails, and, though winter is unknown, the 
summer heat is never great; the islands are always 
green. Australia has for the most part flat, yellow, 
sun-burnt shores; the soil may be rich, the country 
good for wheat and sheep, but to the eye it is an arid 
plain ; the winters are pleasant, but in the hot weather 
the thermometer rises higher in the interior than it 
does in India, and dust storms and hot winds sweep 
the land from end to end. It is impossible to conceive 
countries more unlike each other than are our two 
great dominions of the south. Their very fossils are 
as dissimilar as are their flora and fauna of our time. 

At the dawn of the first day of the new year, we 
sighted the rocks where the Duncan Dunbar was lost 
with all hands, and a few minutes afterward were 
boarded by the crew engaged by the Sydney Morning 



SYDNEY. 11 

Herald, who had been lying at "The Heads" all night, 
to intercept and telegraph our news into the city. The 
pilot and regular news-boat hailed us a little later, when 
w^e had fired a gun. The contrast between this Aus- 
tralian energy and the supineness of the l^ew Zealand- 
ers was striking, but not more so than that between 
my fiist view of Australia and my last view of New 
Zealand. Six days earlier I had lost sight of the snowy 
peak of Mount Egmont, graceful as the Cretan Iva, 
while we ran before a strong breeze, in the bright Eng- 
lish sunlight of the New Zealand afternoon ; the al- 
ba?tro8ses screaming around our stern: to-day, as we 
steamed up Port Jackson, toward Sydney Cove, in the 
dead stillness that follows a night of oven-like heat, 
the sun rose flaming red in a lurid sky, and struck down 
upon brown earth, yellow grass, and the thin shadeless 
foliage of the Australian bush; while, as we anchored, 
the ceaseless chirping of the crickets in the grass and 
trees struck harshly on the ear. 

The harbor, commercially the finest in the world, is 
not without a singular beauty if seen at the best time. 
By the "hot-wind sunrise," as I first saw it, the heat 
and glare destroy the feeling of repose which the end- 
less succession of deep, sheltered coves would other- 
wise convey ; but seen from shore in the afternoon, 
when the sea-breeze has sprung up, turning the sky 
from red to blue, all is changed. From a neck of land 
that leads out to the Government House, you catch a 
glimpse of an arm of the bay on either side, rippled 
with the cool wind, intensely blue, and dotted with 
white sails; the brightness of the colors that the sea- 
breeze brings almost atones for the wind's unhealthi- 
ness. 

In the upper portion of the town the scene is less 
picturesque ; the houses are of the commonplace Eng- 



12 GREATER BRITAIN. 

lisb ugliness, worst of all possible forms of architect- 
ural imbecility, and built, too, as though for English 
fogs, instead of semi tropical heat and sun. Water is 
not to be had, and the streets are given up to clouds 
of dust, while not a single shade-tree breaks the rays of 
the almost vertical sun. 

The afternoon of New Year's day I spent at the 
"Midsummer Meeting" of the Sydney Jockey Club, 
on the race-course near the city, and found a vast 
crowd of holiday-makers assembled on the bare red 
earth that did duty for "turf," although there was a 
hot wind blowing, and the thermometer stood at 103° 
in the shade. For my conveyance to the race-course I 
trusted to one of the Australian hansom cabs, made 
with open fixed Venetian blinds on either side, so as 
to allow a free draught of air. 

The ladies in the grand stand were scarcely to be 
distinguished from Englishwomen in dress or coun- 
tenance, but the crowd presented several curious types. 
The fitness of the term "cornstalks," applied to the 
Australian-born boys, was made evident by a glance 
at their height and slender build; they have plenty of 
activity and health, but are wanting in power and 
weight. The girls, too, are slight and thin; delicate, 
without being sickly. Grown men who have emigrated 
as lads and lived ten or fifteen years in New Zealand, 
eating much meat, spending their days in the open air, 
constantly in the saddle, are burly, bearded, strapping 
fellows, physically the perfection of the English race, 
but wanting in refinement and grace of mind, and this 
apparently constitutionally, not through the accident 
of occupation or position. In Australia there is promise 
of a more intellectual nation: the young Australians 
ride as well, shoot as well, swim as well, as the New 
Zealande|*Sj are as little given to book-learning, but 



SYDNEY, 13 

there is more shrewd intelligence, more wit and quick- 
ness, in the sons of the larger continent. The Aus- 
tralians boast that they possess the Grecian climate, 
and every yoang face in the Sydney crowd showed me 
that their sky is not more like that of the Pelopon- 
nesus than they are like the old Athenians. The eager 
burning democracy that is springing up in the Austra- 
lian great towns is as widely diiFerent from the repub- 
licanism of the older States of the American Union as 
it is from the good-natured conservatism of l^ew Zea- 
land, and their high capacity for personal enjoyment 
would of itself suffice to distinguish the Australians 
from both Americans and British. Large as must be 
the amount of convict blood in New South Wales, 
there w^as no trace of it in the faces of the persons 
pre-(ent upon the race-course. The inhabitants of col- 
onies which have never received felon immigrants often 
cry out that Sydney is a convict city, but the prejudice 
is not borne out by the countenances of the inhabitants, 
nor by the records of local crime. The black stain 
has not yet wholly disappeared : the streets of Sydney 
are still a greater disgrace to civilization than are even 
those of London; but, putting the lighter immoralities 
aside, security for life and property is not more perfect 
in England than in New South Wales. The last of 
the bushrangers were taken while I was in Sydney. 

The race-day was followed by a succession of hot 
winds, during which only the excellence of the fruit- 
market made Sydney endurable. Not only are the 
English fruits to be found, but plantains, guavas, 
oranges, loquats, pomegranates, pine-apples from Bris- 
bane, figs of every kind, and the delicious passion- 
fruit; and if the gum-tree forests yield no shady spots 
for picnics, they are not wanting among the rocks at 
Botany, or in the luxuriant orange-groves of Paramatta. 
VOL. II. 2 



li GREATER BRITAIN. 

A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has sel- 
dom knowQ was brought to a close by one of the 
heaviest southerly storms on record. During the 
stifling morning, the telegraph had announced the ap- 
proach of a gale from the far south, but in the early 
afternoon the heat was more terrible than before, when 
suddenly the sky was dark with whirling clouds, and 
a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying a fog 
of sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to 
pieces many boats. When the gale ceased, some three 
hours later, the sand was so deep in houses that here 
and there men's feet left footprints on the stairs. 

Storms of this kind, diliering only one from another 
in violence, are common in the hot weather: they are 
known as "southerly bursters;" but the earlier settlers 
called them "brickfielders," in the belief that the dust 
they brought was whirled up from the kilns and brick- 
fields to the south of Sydney. The fact is that the 
sand is carried along for one or two hundred miles, 
from the plains in Dampier and Auckland counties; 
for the Australian "burster" is one with the Punjaub 
dust-storm, and the dirt-storm of Colorado. 



mVAL COLONIES. 15 



CHAPTER IT. 



RIVAL COLONIES. 



"New South "Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland 
in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian 
colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a 
common frontier of 700 miles. 

The New South Welsh look with some jealousy upon 
the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant 
prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, as- 
cribing it merely to the gold fields, talk of "shoddy;" 
but of Queensland — an agricultural country, with 
larger tracts of rich lands than they themselves pos- 
sess — the Sydney folks are not without reason envious. 

A terrible depression is at present pervading trade 
and agriculture in 'New South Wales. Much land 
near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; labor is 
scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighboring 
colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have 
made harvest labor unattainable. Many properties 
have fallen to one-third their former value, and the 
colony — a wheat-growing country — is now importing 
wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterlincj 
every year. 

The depressed condition of affairs is the result, 
partly of commercial panics following a period of in- 
flation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now 
drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement of 
immigration by the colonial democrats — a policy which, 
however beneficial to Australia it may in the long run 



16 GREATER BRITAIN. 

prove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers 
and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand, 
the hiborers for their part assert that the arrivals of 
strangers — at all events, of skilled artisans — are still 
excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to 
over-immi2:ratiou and free trade. 

To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour 
of capital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now 
to QaeensUmd and J^ew Zealand, appear to be the chief 
among the causes of the momentary decline of ItTew 
South Wales. Of immisrrants there is at once an in- 
sutlicient and an over-great supply. Respectable serv- 
ant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers, 
and the like, do well in the colonies, and are always 
wanted; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and the 
skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always 
an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are 
just the immigrants of whom thousands seek the col- 
onies every year, in spite of the daily publication in 
England of dissuading letters. 

As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in 
the lapse of time, the jealousy that exists between 
them will doubtless die away, but it seems as though 
it will be replaced by a political divergence, and con- 
sequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source ef 
danger to the Australian confederation. 

In Queensland the great tenants of crown lands, 
"squatters," as the}^ are called, sheep-farmers holding 
vast tracts of inland country, are in possession of the 
government, and administer the laws to their own 
advantage. In New South Wales power is divided 
between the pastoral tenants on the one hand, and the 
democracy of the towns upon the other. In Victoria 
the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in 
the interests of the people put an end to their reign ; 



RIVJL COLONIES. 17 

but the slieep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior 
districts of New South Wales, ignonng wells, assert 
that the "up-country desert" or *^unwatered tracts" 
can never bo made available for agriculture, while the 
democracy of the coast point to the fact that the same 
statements were made only a few years back of lands 
now bearing a prosperous population of agricultural 
settlers. 

The struggle between the great crown tenants and 
the agricultural democracy in Victoria, already almost 
over, in New South Wales can be decided only in one 
way, but in Queensland the character of the country is 
not entirely the same : the coast and river tracts are 
tropical bush-lands, in which sheep-farming is impos- 
sible, and in which sugar, cotton, and spices alone can 
be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides, tallow, 
wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list 
of Australian exports, the Northern colony has already 
added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, 
cinnamon, and quinine. 

The Queen slanders have not yet solved the problem 
of the settlement of a tropical country by Englishmen, 
and of its cultivation by English hands. The future, 
not of Queensland merely, but of Mexico, of Ceylon, of 
every tropical country, of our race, of free government 
itself, are all at stake ; but the success of the experi- 
ment that has been tried between Brisbane and Rock- 
ampton has not been great. The colony, indeed, has 
prospered much, quadrupling its population and treb- 
ling its exports and revenue in six years, but it is the 
Darling Downs, and other table-land sheep countries, 
or, on the other hand, the Northern gold fields, which 
are the main cause of the prosperity ; and in the sugar 
and cotton culture of the coast, colored labor is now 

2* 



18 GBEATEB BRITAIN. 

almost exclusively employed, with the usual effect of 
degrading field-work in the eyes of European settlers, 
and of forcing upon the country a form of society of 
the aristocratic type. 

It is possible that just as New England has of late 
forbidden to Louisiana the importiition of Chinamen 
to work her sugar fields, just as the Kansas radicals 
have declaredthat they will not recognize the Bombay 
Hammal as a brother, just as the Victorians have re- 
fused to allow the farther reception of convicts by 
West Australia, separated from their territories by 
1000 miles of desert, so the l^ew South Welsh and 
Victorians combined may at least protest against the 
introduction of a mixed multitude of Bengalees, China- 
men, South Sea Islanders, and Malays, to cultivate the 
Queensland coast plantations. If, however, the other 
colonies permit their ]N"orthern sister to continue in her 
course of importing dark-skinned laborers, to form a 
peon population, a few years will see her a wealthy 
cotton and sugar-growing country, with all the vices of 
a slaveholding government, though without the name 
of slavery. The planters of the coast and villages, united 
with the squatters of the table-lands or '* Downs," will 
govern Queensland, and render union with the free 
colonies impossible, unless great gold discoveries take 
place, and save the country to Australia. 

Were it not for the pride of race that everywhere 
shows itself in the acts of English settlers, there might 
be a bright side to the political future of Queensland 
colony. The colored laborers at present introduced, 
industrious Tongans, and active Hill-coolies from Hin- 
dostan, laborious, sober, and free from superstition, 
should not only be able to advance the commercial 
fortunes of Queensland as they have those of the Mau- 
ritius, but eventually to take an equal share in free 



BIVAL COLONIES. 19 

government with their white employers. To avoid the 
gigantic evil of the degradation of hand lahor, which 
has ruined morally as well as economically the South- 
ern States of the American republic, the Indian, Malay, 
and Chinese laborers should be tempted to become 
members of landholding associations. A large spice 
and sugar-growing population in Northern Queensland 
would require a vast agricultural population in the 
south to feed it, and the two colonies, hitherto rivals, 
might grow up as sister countries, each depending 
upon the other for the supply of half its needs. It is, 
however, worthy of notice that the agreements of the 
Queensland planters with the imported dark-skinned 
field-hands provide only for the payment of wages m 
goods J at the rates of 6.s. to lO-s. a month. The *' goods" 
consist of pipes, tobacco, knives, and beads. Judging 
from the experience of California and Ceylon, there 
can be little hope of the general admission of colored 
men to equal rights by English settlers, and the Paciiic 
islands offer so tempting a field to the kidnapping com- 
manders of colonial ''island schooners," that there is 
much fear that Queensland may come to show us not 
merely semi-slavery, but peonage of that worst of kinds, 
in which it is cheaper to work the laborer to death 
than to *' breed" him. 

Such is the present rapidity of the growth and rise 
to power of tropical Queensland, such the apparent 
poverty of 'New South Wales, that were the question 
merely one between the Sydney wheat-growers and the 
cotton-planters of Brisbane and Rockampton, the sub- 
tropical settlers would be as certain of the foremost 
position in any future confederation as they were in 
America w^hen the struggle lay only between the Caro- 
linas and New England. As it is, just as America was 
first saved by the coal of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Aus- 



20 GREATER BRITAIN. 

tralia will be saved by the coal of ]^ew South Wales. 
Queensland possesses some small stores of coal, but the 
vast preponderance of acreage of the great power of 
the future is on the side of the free settlers of the 
cooler climate, at JS'ewcastle, in New South Wales. 

On my return from a short voyage to the north, I 
visited the coal field of New South Wales at Newcastle, 
on the Hunter. The beds are of vast extent, they lie 
upon the banks of a navigable river, and so near to the 
surface that the best qualities are raised, in a country 
of dear labor, at %s. or 95. the ton, and delivered on 
board ship for 125. For manufacturing purposes the 
coal is perfect; for steamship use it is, though some- 
what "dirty," a serviceable fuel; and copper and iron 
are found in close proximity to the beds. The New- 
castle and Port Jackson fields open a singularly bril- 
liant future to Sydney in these times, when coal is 
king in a far higher degree than was ever cotton. To 
her black beds the colony will ow^ not only manu- 
factures, bringing wealth and population, but that 
leisure which is begotten of wealth — leisure that brings 
culture, and love of harmony and truth. 

Manufactories are already springing up in the neigh- 
borhood of Sydne}^, adding to the whirl and the bustle 
of the town, and adding, too, to its enormous popula- 
tion, already disproportionate to that of the colony in 
which it stands. As the depot for much of the trade 
of Queensland and New Zealand, and as the metropolis 
of pleasure to which the wealthy squatters pour from 
all parts of Australia, to spend, rapidly enough, their 
hard- won money, Sydney would in any case have been 
a populous city ; but the barrenness of the country in 
which it stands has, until the recent opening of the 
railroads, tended still further to increase its size, by 
failing to tempt into country districts the European 



BIVAL COLONIES. 21 

immigrants. The Irish in Sydney form a third of the 
whole population, yet hardly one of these men but 
meant to settle upon land when he left his native island. 

In France there is a tendency to migrate to Paris, 
in Austria a continual drain toward Vienna, in Eng- 
land toward London. A corresponding tendency is 
observable throughout Australia and America. Immi- 
grants hang about New York, Philadelphia, Boston, 
Sydney, Melbourne; and, finding that they can scrape 
a living in these large cities with toil somewhat less 
severe than that which would be needed to procure 
them a decent livelihood in the bush, the unthrifty as 
well as the dissipated throng together in densely-popu- 
lated "bad quarters" in these cities, and render the 
first quarter of New York and the so-called " Chinese " 
quarter of Melbourne a danger to the colonies, and an 
insult to the civilization of the world. 

In the case of Australia this concentration of popu- 
lation is becoming more remarkable day by day. Even 
under the system of free selection, by which the legis- 
lature has attempted to encourage agricultural settle- 
ment, the moment a free selector can make a little 
money he comes to one of the capitals to spend it. 
Sydney is the city of pleasure, to which the wealthy 
Queensland squatters resort to spend their money, re- 
turning to the north for fresh supplies only when they 
cannot afford another day of dissipation, while Mel- 
bourne receives the outpour of Tasmania. 

The rushing to great cities the moment there is 
money to be spent, characteristic of the settlers in all 
these colonies, is much to be regretted, and presents a 
sad contrast to the quiet stay-at-home habits of Amer- 
ican farmers. Everything here is fever and excite- 
ment ; — as in some systems of geometry, motion is the 
primary, rest the derived idea. New South Welshmen 



22 OBEATER BRITAIN. 

tell you that this unquiet is peculiar to Victoria; to a 
new-comer it seems as rife in Sydney as in Melbourne. 
Judgin p: from the colonial government reports, which 
immigrants are conjured by the inspectors to procure 
and read, and which are printed in a cheap form for 
the purpose, the New South Welsh can hardly wish to 
lure settlers into "the bush," tor in one of these docu- 
ments, published while I was in Sydney, the curator 
of the museum reported that he never went more than 
twelve miles from the city, but that within that circuit 
he found seventeen distinct species of land snakes, two 
of sea snakes, thirty of lizards, and sixteen of frogs — 
seventy-eight species of reptiles rewarded him in all. 
The seventeen species of land snakes found by him 
within the suburbs were named by the curator in a 
printed list ; it commenced with the pale-headed snake, 
and ended with the death-adder. 



CHAPTER III. 

VICTORIA. 

The smallest of our southern colonies except Tas- 
mania, — one-fourth the size of i^ew South Wales, one- 
eighth of Queensland, one-twelfth of West Australia, 
one-titleenth of South Australia, — Victoria is the 
wealthiest of the Australian nations, and, India alone 
excepted, has the largest trade of any of the depend- 
encies of Great Britain. 

When Mr. Fawkner's party landed in 1835 upon the 
Yarra banks, mooring their boat to the forest trees, 



VICTORIA, 23 

they formed a settlement upon a grassy hill behind a 
marsh, and began to pasture sheep where Melbourne, 
the capital, now stands. In twenty years, Melbourne 
became the largest city but one in the southern hemis- 
phere, having 150,000 people within her limits or those 
of the suburban towns. Victoria has grander public 
buildings in her capital, larger and more costly rail- 
roads, a greater income, and a heavier debt than any 
other colony, and she pays to her governor ^10,000 a 
year, or one-fourth more than even iS'ew South Wales. 

When looked into, all this success means gold. 
There is industry, there is energy, there is talent, there 
is generosity and public spirit, but they are the abili- 
ties and virtues that gold will bring, in bringing a rush 
from all the world of dashing fellows in the prime of 
life. The progress of Melbourne is that of San Fran- 
cisco ; it is the success of Kokitika on a larger scale, 
and refined and steadied by having lasted through some 
years — the triumph of a population which has hitherto 
consisted chiefly of adult males. 

Sydney people, in their jealousy of the Victorians, 
refuse to admit even that the superior energy of the 
Melbourne men is a necessary consequence of their 
having been the pride of the spirited youths of all the 
world, brought together by the rush for gold. At the 
time of the first "find" in 1851, all the resolute, able, 
])hy8ically strong do-noughts of Europe and America 
flocked into Port Phillip, as Victoria was then called, 
and such timid and weak men as came along with them 
being soon crowded out, the men of energy and tough 
vital force alone remained. 

Some of the New South Welsh, shutting their eyes 
to the facts connected with the gold-rush, assert so 
loudly that the Victorians are the refuse of California, 
or "Yankee scum," that when I first landed in Mel-. 



24 QBE ATE R BRITAIN. 

bourne I expected to find street-cars, revolvers, big 
hotnls, and fire-clubs, euchre, caucusses, and mixed 
drinks. I could discover nothing American about 
Melbourne except the grandeur of the public buildings 
and the width of the streets, and its people are far more 
thoroughly British than are the citizens of the rival 
capital. In many senses Melbourne is the London, 
Sydney the Paris, of Australia. 

About the surpassing vigor of the Victorians there 
can be no doubt ; a glance at the map shows the Vic- 
torian railways stretching to the Murray, while those 
of New South Wales are still boggling at the Green 
Hills, fifty miles from Sydney. Melbourne, the more 
distant port, has carried off the Australian trade with 
the New Zealand gold fields from Sydney, the nearer 
port. Melbourne imports Sydney shale, and makes 
from it mineral oil, before the Sydney people have 
found out its value; and gas in Melbourne is cheaper 
than in Sydney, though the Victorians are bringing 
their coal ^^ve hundred miles, from a spot only fifty 
miles from Sydney. 

It is possible that the secret of the superior energy 
of the Victorians may be, not in the fact that they are 
more American, but more English, than the New 
South Welsh. The leading Sydney people are mainly 
the sons or grandsons of original settlers, "cornstalks" 
reared in the semi-tropical climate of the coast; the 
Victorians are full-blooded English immigrants, bred 
in he n^ore rugged climes of Tasmania, Canada, or 
Great Britain, and brought only in their maturity to 
live in the exhilarating air of Melbourne, the finest 
climate in the world for healthy men : Melbourne is 
hotter than Sydney, but its climate is never tropical. 
The squatters on the Queensland downs, mostly immi- 
grants from England, show the same strong vitality 



THE OLD AND THE NEW. 




BUSH SCENERY. 




COLLINS STREET EAST, MELBOURNE.— P. 24. 



VICTORIA. 25 

that the Melbourne men possess; but their brother im- 
migrants in Brisbane — the Queensland capital, where 
the afternoon languid breeze resembles that of Sydney 
—are as incapable of prolonged exertion as are the 
Sydney " cornstalks." 

Whatever may be the causes of the present triumph 
of Melbourne over Sydney, the inhabitants of the latter 
city are far from accepting it as likely to be permanent. 
They cannot but admit the present glory of what they 
call the *' Mushroom City." The magniiicent pile of 
the new Post-office, the gigantic Treasury (which, 
when finished, will be larger than our own in Lon- 
don), the University, the Parliament-house, the Union 
and Melbourne Clubs, the City Hall, the Wool Ex- 
change, the viaducts upon the government railroad 
lines, — all are Cyclopean in their architecture, all seem 
built as if to last forever; still, they say that there is a 
certain want of permanence about the prosperity of 
Victoria. When the gold discovery took place, in 
1851, such trade sprang up that the imports of the 
colony jumped from one million to twenty-five mil- 
lions sterling in three years ; but, although she is now 
commencing to ship breadstuffs to Great Britain, ex- 
ports and imports alike show a steady decrease. Con- 
siderably more than half of the hand-workers of the 
colony are still engaged in gold-mining, and nearly 
half the population is resident upon the gold fields ; 
yet the yield shows, year by year, a continual decline. 
Had it not been for the discoveries in !N'ew Zealand, 
which have carried off the floating digger population, 
and for the wise discouragement by the democrats of 
the monopolization of the land, there would have been 
distress upon the gold fields during the last few years. 
The Victorian population is already nearly stationary, 
and the squatters call loudly for assisted immigration 

VOL. II. 3 



26 GREATER BRITAIN. 

and free trade, but the stranger sees nothing to astonish 
him in the temporary stagnation that attends a de- 
creasing gold production. 

The exact economical position that Victoiia occupies 
is easily ascertained, for her statistics are the most per- 
fect in the world; the arrangement is a piece of exqui- 
site mosaic. The brilliant statistician who fills the 
post of registrar-general to the colony, had the im- 
mense advantage of starting clear of all tradition, un- 
hampered and unclogged; and, as the governments of 
the other colonies have of the last few years taken 
Victoria for model, a gradual approach is being made 
to uniformity of system. It was not too soon, for 
British colonial statistics are apt to be confusing. I 
have seen a list of imposts, in which one class consisted 
of ale, aniseed, arsenic, assafoetida, and astronomical 
instruments; boots, bullion, and salt butter; capers, 
cards, caraway seed; gauze, gin, glue, and gloves; 
maps and manure; philosophical instruments and salt 
pork; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked sausages. 
Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official 
mind. 

Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but 
the statistics of these young countries are figure- 
poems. Tables that in England contrast jute with 
hemp, or this man with that man, here compare the 
profits of manufactures with those of agriculture, or 
pit against each other, the powers of race and race. 

Victoria is the only country in existence which pos- 
sesses a statistical history from its earliest birth ; but, 
after all, even Victoria falls short of Minnesota, where 
the settlers founded the *' State Historical Society" a 
week before the foundation of the State. 

Gold, wheat, sheep, are the three great staples of 
Victoria, and have each its party, political and com- 



VIGTOBIA. 2' 

mercial — diggers, agricultural settlers, and sqnatters- 
tliough of late the diggers and the landed democraq 
have made common cause against the squatters. Gold 
can now be studied best at Ballarat, and wheat al; 
Clunes, or upon the Barrabool hills behind Geelon£ ; 
but 1 started tirst for Echuca, the headquarters of tl a 
squatter interest, and metropolis of sheep, taking upc n 
my way Kyneton, one of the richest agricultural dis- 
tricts of the colony, and also the once famous gold dig- 
gings of Bendigo Creek. 

Between Melbourne and Kyneton, where I made 
rhy first halt, the railway runs through undulating 
lightly-timbered tracks, free from underwood, and well 
grassed. By letting my eyes persuade me that the 
burnt-up herbage was a ripening crop of wheat or oats, 
I found a likeness to the views in the weald of Sussex, 
though the foliage of the gums, or eucalypti, is thinner 
than that of the English oaks. 

a Kiding from Kyneton to Carlsruhe, Pastoria, and 
the foot hills of the "Dividing Range," I found the 
agricultural community busily engaged upon the har- 
vest, and much excited upon the great thistle question. 
Women and tiny children were working in the fields, 
while the men were at Kyneton, trying in vain to hire 
the harvest hands from Melbourne at less than <£2 IQs. 
or ^3 a week and board. The thistle question was not 
less serious; the "thistle inspectore," elected under 
the "Thistle Prevention Act," had commenced their 
labors, and although each man agreed with his friend 
that his neighbor's thistles were a nuisance, still he did 
not like being fined for not weeding out his own. The 
fault, they say, lies in the climate ; it is too good, and 
the English seeds have thriven. Great as was the 
talk of thistles, the fields in the fertile Kyneton dis- 
trict were as clean as in a well-kept English farm, and 



28 GREATER BRITAIN. 

showed the clearest signs of the small farmer's personal 
care. 

Every one of the agricultural villages in Australia 
that I visited was a full-grown municipality. The col- 
onial English, freed from the checks which are put by 
interested landlords to local government in Britain, 
have passed in all the settlements laws under which 
any village must be raised into a municipality on fifty 
of the villagers (the number varies in the different col- 
onies) signing a requisition, unless within a given time 
a larger number sign a petition to the contrary effect. 

After a short visit to the bustling digging town of 
Castlemaine, I pushed on by train to Sandhurst, a town 
of great pretensions, w^hich occupies the site of the 
former digging camp at Bendigo. On a level part of 
the line between the two great towns, my train dashed 
through some closed gates, happily without hurt. The 
Melbourne Argus of the next day said that the crash had 
been the result of the signalman taking the fancy that 
the trains should wait on him, not he upon the trains, 
so he had *' closed the gates, hoisted the danger signal, 
and adjourned to a neighboring store to drink." On 
my return from Echuca, I could not find that he had 
been dismissed. 

When hands are scarce, and lives valuable not to 
the possessor only, but to the whole community, care 
to avoid accidents might be expected ; but there is a 
certain recklessness in all young countries, and not 
even in Kansas is it more observable than in Victoria 
and ]^ew South Wales. 

Sandhurst, like Castlemaine, straggles over hill and 
dale for many miles, the diggers following the gold- 
leads, and building a suburb by each alluvial mine, 
rather than draw their supplies from the central spot. 
The extent of the worked-out gold field struck me as 



VIGTOHIA. 29 

greater than the fields round Placerville, but then in 
California many of the old diggings are hidden by the 
vines. 

In Sandhurst I could find none of the magnificent 
restaurants of Virginia City; none of the gambling 
saloons of Ilokitika ; and the only approach to gayety 
among the diggers was made in a drinking-hall, where 
some dozen red-shirted, bearded men were dancing by 
turns with four well-behaved and quiet-looking German 
girls, who were paid, the constable at the gate informed 
me, by the proprietor of the booth. My hotel — "The 
Shamrock^' — kept by New York Irish, was a thor- 
oughly American house; but, then, digger civilization 
is everywhere American — -a fact owing, no doubt, to 
the American element having been predominant in 
the first- discovered diggings — those of California. 

Difforer revolts must have been feared when the 

CO 

Sandhurst Government Reserve was surrounded with 
a ditch strangely like a moat, and palings that bear an 
ominous resemblance to a Maori pah. In the morn- 
ing I found my way through the obstructions, and dis- 
covered the police station, and in it the resident magis- 
trate, to whom I had a letter. He knew nothing of 
" Gumption Dick," Hank Monk's friend, but he intro- 
duced me to his intelligent Chinese clerk, and told me 
many things about the yellow diggers. The bad feel- 
ing between the English diggers and the Chinese has 
not in the least died out. Upon the worked-out fields of 
Castlemaine and Sandhurst, the latter have things their 
own w^ay, and I saw hundreds of them washing quietly 
and quickly in the old Bendigo Creek, finding an ample 
living in the leavings of the whites. So successful have 
they been that a few Europeans have lately been taking 
to their plan, and an old Frenchman who died here 

3* 



30 GREATER BRITAIN. 

lately, and who, from his working persistently in worn- 
out fields, had always been thought to be a harmless 
idiot, left behind him a fortune of twenty thousand 
pounds, obtained by washing in company with the 
Chinese. 

The spirit that called into existence the Ballarat 
anti-Chinese mobs is not extinct in Queensland, as I 
found during my stay at Sydney. At the Crocodile 
Creek diggings in IsTorthern Queensland, whither many 
of the Chinese from New South Wales have lately 
gone, terrible riots occurred the week after I landed 
in Australia. The English diggers announced their 
intention of "rolling up" the Chinese, and proceeded 
to "jump their claims" — that is, trespass on the mining 
plots, for in Queensland the Chinese have felt them- 
selves strong enough to purchase claims. The Chinese 
bore the robbery for some days, but at last a digger 
who had sold them a claim for £50 one morning, 
hammered, the pegs into the soft ground the same 
day, and then jumped the claim on the pretense that 
it was not "pegged out." This was too much for the 
Chinese owner, who tomahawked the digger on the 
spot. The English at once tired the Chinese town, 
and even attacked the English driver of a coach for 
conveying Chinamen on his vehicle. Some diggers 
in N'orth Queensland are said to have kept blood- 
hounds for the purpose of hunting Chinamen for sport, 
as the rowdies of the old country hunt cats with 
terriers. 

On the older gold fields, such as those of Sandhurst 
and Castlemaine, the hatred of the English for the 
Chinese lies dormant, but it is not the less strong for 
being free from physical violence. The woman in a 
baker's shop near Sandhurst, into which I went to buy 
a roll lor lunch, shuddered when she told me of one 



VICTORIA, ai 

or two recent marriages between Irish ^'Biddies" and 
some of the wealthiest Chinese. 

The man against whom all this hatred and suspicion 
is directed is no ill-c©nducted rogue or villain. The 
chief of the police at Sandhurst tells me that the Chi- 
nese are ^'the best of citizens;" a member of the Vic- 
torian Parliament, resident in the very edge of their 
quarter at Geelong, spoke of the yellow men to me as 
" well-behaved and frugal;" the registrar-general told 
me that there is less crime, great or small, among the 
Chinese, than among any equal number of English in 
the colony. 

The Chinese are not denied civil rights in Victoria, 
as they have been in California. Their testimony is 
accepted in the courts against that of whites ; they 
may become naturalized, and then can vote. Some 
twenty or thirty of them, out of 30,000, have been 
naturalized in Victoria up to the present time. 

That the Chinese in Australia look upon their stay 
in the gold fields as merely temporary is clear from 
the character of their restaurants, which are singularly 
inferior to those of San Francisco. The best in the 
colonies is one near Castlemaine, but even this is small 
and poor. Shark's fin is an unheard-of luxury, and 
even puppy you would have to order. " Silk-worms 
fried in castor oil" is the colonial idea of a Chinese 
delicacy ; yet the famous sea-slug is an inhabitant of 
Queensland waters, and the Gulf of Carpentaria. 

From Sandhurst northward, the country, known as 
Elysium Flats, becomes level, and is wooded in patches, 
like the *' oak-opening" prairies of Wisconsin and Illi- 
nois. When within fifty miles of Echuca, the line 
comes out of the forest on to a vast prairie, across which 
I saw a marvelous mirage of water and trees on various 
etep-like levels. From the other window of the com- 



32 GREATEB BRITAIN. 

partment carriage (sadly hot and airless after the Amer- 
ican ears), I saw the thin divy yellow grass on fire for 
a dozen miles. The smoke from these " bush-fires" 
sometimes extends for hundrecfs of miles to sea. In 
steaming down from Sydney to Wilson's Promontory 
on my way to Melbourne, we passed through a column 
of smoke about a mile in width when ofi* Wolongong, 
near Botany Bay, and never lost sight of it, as it lay in 
a dense brown mass upon the sea, until we rounded 
Cape Howe, two hundred miles farther to the south- 
ward. 

The fires on these great plains are caused by the 
dropping of fusees by travelers as they i ide along smok- 
ing their pipes Australian fashion, or else by spreading 
of the tires from their camps. The most ingenious 
stories are invented by the colonists to prevent us from 
throwing doubt upon their carefulness, and I was told 
at Echuca that the late fires had been caused by the 
concentration of the sun's rays upon spots of grass 
owing to the accidental conversion into burning-glasses 
of beer-bottles that had been suftered to lie about. 
'W^hatever their cause, the tires, in conjunction with 
the heat, have made agricultural settlement upon the 
Murray a lottery. The week before my visit, some 
ripe oats at Echuca had been cut down to stubble by 
the hot wind, and farmers are said to count upon the 
success of only one harvest in every three seasons. On 
the other hand, the Victorian apricots, shriveled by 
the hot wind, are so many lumps of crystallized nectar 
when you pierce their thick outer coats. 

Defying the sun, I started off to the banks of the 
Murray River, not without some regret at the absence 
of the continuous street verandas which in Melbourne 
form a first step toward the Italian piazza. One may 
be deceived by trifles when the character of an unknown 



VIC TO It LL 33 

region is at stake. Before reaching the country, I had 
read, " Steam-packet Hotel, Esplanade, Echuca;" and, 
though experiences on the Ohio had taught me to put 
no trust in "packets," yet I had somehow come to the 
helief that the Murray must be a second Missouri at 
least, if not an Upper Mississippi. The "Esplanade" 
I found to be a myth, and the " fleet" ot " steam- 
packets" were drawn up in a long line upon the mud, 
there beins^ in this summer weather no water in which 
they could float. The Murray in February is a stream- 
less ditch, which in America, if known and named at 
all, would rank as a tenth-rate river. 

The St. Lawrence is 2200 miles in length, and its 
tributary, the Ottawa, 1000 miles in length, itself re- 
ceives a tributary stream, the Gatineau, with a course 
of 420 miles. At 217 miles from its confluence with 
the Ottawa the Gatineau is still 1000 feet in width. At 
Albury, which even in winter is the head of navigation 
on the Murray, you are only some 600 or 700 miles by 
river from the open sea, or about the same distance as 
from Memphis in Tennessee to the mouth of the Mis- 
sissippi. 

During six months of the year, however, the Mur- 
ray is for wool-carrying purposes an important river. 
The railway to Echuca has tapped the river system in 
the Victorians' favor, and Melbourne has become the 
port of the back country of New South Wales, and 
even Queensland. "The Riverina is cpmmercially 
annexed" to Victoria, said the premier of New South 
AVales while I was in that colony, and the "Riverina" 
means that portion of New South Wales which lies 
between the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee, and the 
Murray, to the northward of Echuca. 

Returning to the inn to escape the sun, I took up 
the Riverina Herald, published at Echuca; of its twenty- 



34 GREATER BRITAIN. 

four columns, nineteen and a half are occupied by the 
eternal sheep in one shape or another. A representa- 
tion of Jason's fleece stands at the head of the title ; 
"wool" is the first word in the first line of the body of 
the paper. More than half of the advertisements are 
those of wool brokers, or else of the fortunate posses- 
sors of specifics that will cure the scab. One disin- 
fectant compound is certified to by no less than seven- 
teen inspectors; another is pufied by a notice informing 
flock-masters that, in cases of foot-rot, the advertiser 
goes upon the principle of "no cure, no pay." One 
firm makes "liberal advances on the ensuing clip;" 
another is prepared to do the like upon "pastoral secu- 
rities." Sheep-chandlers, regardless of associations, 
advertise in one line their bread and foot-rot ointment, 
their biscuit and sheep-wash solution; and the last of 
the advertisements upon the front page is that of an 
"agent for the sale of fat." The body of the paper 
contains complaints against the judges at a recent show 
of wool, and an account of the raising of a sawyer " 120 
feet in length and 33 feet in girth" by the new "snag- 
boat" working to clear out the river for the floating 
down of the next wool clip. Whole columns of small 
type are filled with "impounding" lists, containing 
brief descriptions of all the strayed cattle of each dis- 
trict. The technicalities of the distinctive marks are 
surprising. Who not to the manner born can make 
muTih of this: "Blue and white cow, cock horns, 22 
ofl-rump, IL off'-ribs?" or of this: " Strawberry stag, 
top off off-ear, J. C. over 4 off-rump, like H. G. con- 
joined near loin and rump?" This, again, is difficult: 
"Swallow tail, off-ear, q; and illegible over F off-ribs, 
PT off-rump." What is a "blue strawberry bull?" is 
a question which occurred to me. Again, what a pne- 
nomenon is this: "White cow, writing capital A off- 



VICTOBIA. 35 

shoulder?'* A paragraph relates the burning of 
"XlOjOOO worth of country near Gambler," and adver- 
tisements of Colt's revolvers and quack medicines 
complete the sheet. The paper shows that for the 
most part the colonists here, as in I^ew Zealand, have 
had the wisdom to adopt the poetic native names of 
places, and even to use them for towns, streets, and 
ships. Of the Panama liners, the Baham and Maitoura 
bear the names of rivers, the Bechine and the Kaikouray 
names of mountain ranges ; and the colonial boats 
have for the most part familiar Maori or Australian 
names; for instance, JRangitoto^ "hill of hills," and 
Rangltiri, "great and good." The New Zealand col- 
onists are better oif than the Australian in this respect : 
Wongawonga, Yarrayarra, and Wooloomooloo are not 
inviting; and some of the Australian villagers have 
still stranger names. Nindooinbah is a station in south- 
ern Queensland; Yallack-a-yallack:,Borongorong, Bun- 
duramongee, Jabbarabbara, Thuroroolong, Yalla-y- 
poora, Yanac-a-Yanac, Wuid Kerruick, Woolongu- 
woong-wrinan, Woori Yalloak, and Borhoneyghurk, 
are stations in Victoria. The only leader in the Herald 
is on the meat question, but there is in a letter an ac- 
count of the Christmas festivities at Melbourne, which 
contains much merry-making at the expense of "unac- 
climatized new chums," as fresh comers to the col- 
onies are called. The writer speaks rapturously of the 
rush on Christmas-day from the hot, dry, dusty streets 
to the "golden fields of waving corn." The "exposed 
nature of the Royal Park" prevented many excursion- 
ists from picnicking there, as they had intended; but 
we read on, and find that the exposure dreaded was 
not to cold, but to the terrible hot wind which swept 
from the plains of the northwest, and scorched up 
every blade of grass, every green thing, in th© open 



36 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

spot«. We hear of Christinas dinners eaten upon the 
grass at Eichmond, in the sheltered shade of the gum- 
forest, but in the botanical gardens the ^^ plants had 
been much affected by the trying heat." However, 
" the weather on boxing-day was somewhat more favor- 
able for open-air enjoyment," as the thermometer was 
only 98° in the shade. 

Will ever New Zealand or Australian bard spring 
up to write of the pale primroses that in September 
commence to peep out from under the melting snows, 
and to make men look forward to the blazing heat and 
the long December days ? Strangely enough, the only 
English poem which an Australian lad can read with- 
out laughing at the old country conceit that connects 
frosts with January, and hot weather with July, is 
Thomson's "Seasons," for in its long descriptions of 
the changes in England from spring to summer, from 
autumn to winter, a month is only once named: ''rosy- 
footed May" cannot be said to "steal blushing on" in 
Australia, where May answers to our ^N'ovember. 

In the afternoon, I ventured out again, and strolled 
into the gam-forest on the banks of the Campaspe 
Biver, not believing the reports of the ferocity of the 
Victorian bunyips and alligators which have lately 
scared the squatters who dwelt on creeks. The black 
trees, relieved upon a ground of white dust and yellow 
grass, were not inviting, and the scorching heat soon 
taught me to hate the shadeless boughs and ragged 
bark of the inevitable gum. It had not rained for 
nine weeks at the time of my visit, and the ther- 
mometer (in the wind) reached 116° in the shade, but 
there was nothing oppressive in the heat ; it seemed 
only to dry up the juices of the frame, and dazzle you 
with intense brightness. I soon came to agree with a 
newly-l?^nded Iriah gardener, who told a friend of mine 



VICTORIA. 37 

that Australia was a strange country, for he could not 
Bee that the thermometer had "the slightest effect 
upon the heat." The hlaze is healthy, and fevers are 
unknown in the Riverina, decay of noxious matter, 
animal or vegetable, being arrested during summer by 
the drought. This is, a hot year, for on the 12th of 
Januar}^ the thermometer, even at the Melbourne Ob- 
servatorj^, registered 108° in the shade, and 123° in the 
shade was registered at Wentworth, near the confluence 
of the Murray and the Darling. 

As the afternoon drew on, and, if not the heat, at 
least the sun declined, the bell-birds ceased their tune- 
ful chiming, and the forest was vocal only with the 
ceaseless chirp of the tree-cricket, whose note recalled 
the goatsucker of our English woods. The Australian 
landscapes show best by the red light of the hot 
weather sunsets, when the dark feathery foliage of the 
gum-trees comes out in exquisite relief upon the fiery 
fogs that form the sky, and the yellow earth gaining a 
tawny hue in the lurid glare, throws off a light resem- 
bling that which in winter is reflected from our English 
snows. At sunset there was a calm, but, as I turned 
to walk homeward, the hot wind sprang up, and died 
again, while the trees sighed themselves uneasily to 
sleep, as though fearful of to-morrow's blast. 

A night of heavy heat was followed by a breathless 
dawn, and the scorching sun returned in all its red- 
ness to burn up once more the earth, not cooled from 
the glare of yesterday. Englishmen must be bribed 
by enormous gains before they will work with con- 
tinuous toil in such a climate, however healthy. 



VOL. II. 



38 GHEATEE BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER ly. 

SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY. 

""What is a Colonial Conservative ?" is a question 
that used to be daily put to a Victorian friend of mine 
when he was in London. His answer, he told me, was 
always, "A statesman who has got four of the 'points* 
of the People's Charter, and wants to conserve them," 
but as used in Victoria, the term " Conservative" ex- 
presses the feeling less of a political party than of the 
whole of the people who have anything whatever to 
lose. Those who have something object to giving a 
share in the government to those who have nothing; 
those ^yho have much, object to political equality with 
those who have less; and, not content with having won 
a tremendous victory in basing the Upper House upon 
a £5000 qualification and £100 freehold or £300 lease- 
hold franchise, the plutocracy are meditating attacks 
upon the Legislative Assembly. 

The democracy hold out undauntedly, refusing all 
monetary tests, though an intelligence basis for the 
franchise is by no means out of favor, except with the 
few who cannot read or write. One day, when I was 
driving from Melbourne to Sandridge, in company with 
a colonial merchant, he asked our car-driver: "JSTow, 
tell me fairly: do you think these rogues of fellows 
that hang about the shore here ought to have votes ?" 
''!N^o, I don't." "Ah, you'd like to see a 55. fee on 
registration, wouldn't you?" The answer was sharp 



SQUATTER ABISTOCRACY. 39 

enough in its tone. " Five shillings would be nothing 
to you; it would be something to me, and it would be 
more than my brother could pay. What I'd have 
done would be to say that those who couldn't read 
shouldn't vote, that's all. That would keep out the 
loafers.'"' 

The plutocratic party is losing, not gaining, ground 
in Victoria ; it is far more likely that the present gen- 
eration will see the Upper House abolished than that 
it will witness the introduction of restrictions upon the 
manhood suffrage which exists for the Lower; but 
there is one branch of the plutocracy which actively 
carries on the light in all the colonies, and which claims 
to control society, the pastoral tenants of crown lands, 
or Squatter Aristocracy. 

The word "squatter" has undergone a remarkable 
change of meaning since the time when it denoted 
those who stole government land, and built their 
dwellings on it. As late as 1837, squatters were de- 
fined by the chief justice of JSTew South "Wales as 
people occupying lands without legal title, and who 
were subject to a fine on discovery. They were de- 
scribed as living by bartering rum with convicts for 
stolen goods, and as being themselves invariably con- 
victs or " expirees." 

Escaping suddenly from these low associations, the 
word came to be applied to graziers wdio drove their 
fiocks into the unsettled interior, and thence to those 
of them who received leases from the crown of pas- 
toral lands. 

The squatter is the nabob of Melbourne and Sydney, 
the inexhaustible mine of wealth. He patronizes balls, 
promenade concerts, flower-shows; he is the mainstay 
of the great clubs, the joy of the shopkeepers, the good 
angel of the hotels ; without him the opera could not 



40 GREATER BRITAIN. 

be kept up, and the jockej-clubs would die a natural 
death. 

Neither squatters nor townsfolk will admit that this 
view of the former's position is exactly correct. The 
Victorian squatters tell you that they have been ruined 
by confiscation, but that their neighbors in New South 
Wales, who have leases, are more prosperous; in New 
South Wales they tell jow of the destruction of the 
squastters by ''free selection," of which there is none 
in Queensland, "the squatter's paradise;" but in 
Queensland the squatters protest that they have never 
made wages for their personal work, far less interest 
upon their capital. "Not one of us in ten is solvent," 
they say. 

As sweeping assertions are made by the townsfolk 
upon the other side. The squatters, they sometimes 
say, may well set up to be a great landed aristocracy, 
for they have every fault of a dominant caste except 
its generous vices. They are accused of piling up vast 
hoards of wealth while living a most penurious life, 
and contributing less than Avould so many mechanics 
to the revenue of the country, in order that they may 
return in later life to England, there to spend what 
they have wrung from the soil of Victoria or New 
South Wales. 

The occupation of the whole of the crown lands by 
squatters has prevented the making of railways to be 
paid for in land on the American system ; but the 
chief of all the evils connected with squatting is the 
tendency to the accumulation in a few hands of all the 
land and all the pastoral w^ealth of the country, an 
extreme danger in the face of democratic institutions, 
such as those of Victoria and New South Wales. Ee- 
memberins: that manufactures are few, the swelling of 
the cities shows how the people have been kept from 



SQUATTER AEISTOCEACY. 41 

the land; considerably more than half of the popula- 
tion of Victoria lives within the corporate towns. 

A few years back, a thousand men held between 
them, on nominal rents, forty million acres out of the 
forty-three and a half million — mountain and swamp 
excluded — of which Victoria consists. It is true that 
the amount so held has now decreased to thirty mil- 
lion, but on the other hand the squatters have bought 
vast tracts which were formerly within their " runs," 
with the capital acquired in squatting, and, knowing 
the country better than others could possibly know it, 
have naturally selected all the most valuable land. 

The colonial democracy in 1860 and the succeeding 
years rose to a sense of its danger from the land 
monopoly, and began to search about for means to 
put it down, and to destroy at the same time the sys- 
tem of holding from the crown, for it is singular that 
while in England there seems to be springing up a 
popular movement in favor of the nationalization of 
the land, in the most democratic of the Australian 
colonies the tendency is from crown land tenure to 
individual freehold ownership of the soil rather than 
the other way. Yet here in Victoria there was a free 
field to start upon, for the land already belonged to 
the State — the first of the principles included under 
the phrase, nationalized land. In America, again, we 
see that, with the similar advantage of State posses- 
sion of territories which are still fourteen times the 
size of the French Empire, there is little or no tend- 
ency toward agitation for the continuance of State 
ownership. In short, freehold ownership, the Saxon 
institution, seems dear to the Anglo-Saxon race. The 
national land plan would commend itself rather to the 
Celtic races: to the Highlander, who remembers clan- 
ship, to the Irishman, who regrets the Sept. 

4* 



42 QBE ATE R BRITAIN, 

Since the liadicals have been in power, both here 
and in Kew South Wales, they have carried act after 
act to encourage agricultural settlers on freehold tenure, 
at the expense of the pastoral squatters. The '' free 
selection" plan, now in operation in New South Wales, 
allows the agricultural settler to buy, but at a fixed 
price, the freehold of a patch of land, provided it be 
over forty acres and less than 820, anywhere he pleases 
— even in the middle of a squatter's "run," if he en- 
ters at once, and commences to cultivate; and the Land 
Act of 1862 provides that the squatting license system 
shall entirely end with the ^-ear 1869. Forgetting that 
in every lease the government reserved the power of 
terminating the agreement for the purpose of the sale 
of land, the squatters complain that free selection is 
but confiscation, and that they are at the mercy of a 
pack of cattle-stealers and horse-thieves, who roam 
through the country haunting their "runs" like 
"ghosts," taking up the best land on their "runs," 
" picking the eyes out of the land," turning to graze 
anywhere, on the richest grass, the sheep and cattle 
they have stolen on their way. The best of them, they 
say, are but " cockatoo farmers," living from hand to 
mouth on what they manage to grub and grow. On 
the other hand, the "free selection" principle "up 
country" is tempered by the power of the wealthy 
squatter to impound the cattle of the poor little free- 
holder whenever he pleases to say that they stray on 
to his "run;" indeed, "Pound them off, or if you 
can't, buy them ofl:'," has become a much used phrase. 
The squatter, too, is protected in Victoria by such pro- 
visions as that "improvements" by him, if over £40 on 
forty acres, cover an acre of land for each £1, The 
squatters are themselves buying largely of land, and 
thus profiting by the free selection. To a stranger it 



SQUATTER AEISTOCBACY. 4!^ 

seems as though the interests of the squatter have been 
at least sufficiently cared for, remembei'ing the vital 
necessity for immediate action. In 1865, Victoria, 
small as she is, had not sold a tenth of her land. 

In her free selectors, Victoria will gain a class of 
citizens whose political views will contrast sharply 
with the strong anti-popular sentiments of the squat- 
ters, and who, instead of spending their lives as ab- 
sentees, will stay, they and their children, upon the 
land, and spend all they make within the colony, while 
their sons add to its laboring arms. 

Since land has been, even to a limited extent, thrown 
open, Victoria has suddenly ceased to be a wheat-im- 
porting, and become a wheat-exporting country, and 
flourishing agricultural communities, such as those of 
Ceres, Clunes, Kyneton, are springing up on every 
side, growing wheat instead of wool, while the wide 
extension which has in Victoria been given to the 
principle of local self-government in the shape of shire- 
councils, road-boards, and village-municipalities allows 
of the junction in a happy country of the whole of the 
advantages of small and great farming, under the un- 
equaled system of small holdings, and co-operation 
for improvements among the holders. 



44 GREATER BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER y. 



COLONIAL DEMOCRACY. 



Payment of members by the State was the ffreat 
question under debate in the Lower House during 
much of the time I spent in Melbourne, and, in spite 
of all the eitbrts of the Victorian democracy, the bill 
was lost. The objection taken at home, that payment 
degrades the House in the eyes of the people, could 
never arise in a new country, where a practical nation 
looks at the salaries as payment for work done, and 
obstinately refuses to belieye in the work beins: done 
without payment in some shape or other. In these 
colonies, the reasons in fayor of payment are far 
stronger than they are in Canada or America, for while 
their country or town share equally the diiiiculties of 
finding representatiyes who will consent to travel hun- 
dreds and thousands of miles to Ottawa or Washing- 
ton, in the AustraLias Parliament sits in towns which 
contain from one-sixth to one-fourth of the whole 
population, and under a non-payment system power is 
thrown entirely into the hands of Melbourne, Sydney, 
Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Hobarton. Kot only 
do these cities return none but their own citizens, but 
the country districts, often unable to find within their 
limits men who haye the time and money to make 
them able to attend throughout the sessions at the 
capital, elect the city traders to represent them. 

Payment of members was met by a proportion on 



COLONIAL DE310CRAGY. 45 

the part of the leader of the squatter party in the 
Upper House to carry it through that assembly if the 
Lower House would introduce the principle of per- 
sonal representation; but it was objected that under 
such a system the Catholics, who form a fifth of the 
population, might, if they chose, return a fifth of the 
members. That they ought to be able to do so never 
seemed to stril^e iriend or foe. The Catholics, who 
had a long turn of power under the O'Shaughnessey 
government, were finall}- driven out for appointing 
none but Irishmen to the police. "I always said this 
ministry would go out on the back of a policeman," 
was the comment of the Opposition wit. The present 
ministry, which is Scotch in tone, was hoisted into 
office by a great coalition against the Irish Catholics, 
of whom there are only a handful in the House. 

The subject of national education, which was before 
the colony during my visit, also brought the Catholics 
prominently forward, for an episcopal pastoral was 
read in all their churches threatening to visit ecclesi- 
astical censure upon Catholic teachers in the common 
schools, and upon the parents of the children who 
attend them. " Godless education" is as little popular 
here as it used to be at home, and the Anglican and 
Catholic clergymen insist that it is proposed to make 
their people pay heavily for an education in which it 
would be contrary to their conscience to share; but 
the laymen seem leas distressed than their pastors. It 
has been said that the reason why the Catholic bishop 
declined to be examined upon the Education Com- 
mission was that he was afraid of this question: "Are 
you aware that half the Catholic children in the coun- 
try are attending schools which you condemn?" 

The most singular, perhaps, of the spectacles pre- 
sented by colonial politics during my visit was that of 



46 GREATER BRITAIN, 

the Victorian Upper House going deliberately into 
committee to consider its own constitution, with the 
view of introducing a bill for its own reform, or to 
meditate, its enemies said, upon self-destruction. 
Whether the blow comes from within or without, 
there is every probability that the Upper House will 
shortly disappear, and the advice of Milton and 
Eranklin be followed in having but a single chamber. 
It is not unlikely that this step will be followed by 
the demand of the Victorians to be allowed to choose 
their own governor, subject to his approval by the 
queen, with a view to making it impossible that 
needy men should be sent out to suck the colony, aa 
they sometimes have been in the past. The Austra- 
lians look upon the liberal expenditure of a governor 
as their own liberality, but upon meanness on his part 
as a robbery from themselves. 

The Victorian have a singular advantage over the 
American democrats as being unhampered by a con- 
stitution of antiquity and renown. Constitution-tink- 
ering is here continual; the new society is continually 
reshaping its political institutions to keep pace with the 
latest developments of the national mind; in America, 
the party of liberty, at this moment engaged in re- 
moulding the worn-out constitution in favor of free- 
dom, dares not even yet proclaim that the national 
good is its aim, but keeps to the old watchwords, and 
professes to be treading in the footsteps of George 
Washington. 

The tone of Victorian democracy is not American. 
There is the defiant way of taking care of themselves 
and ignoring their neighbors, characteristic of the 
founders of English plantations in all parts of the 
world ; the spirit which prompted the passing, in 1852, 
of the act prohibiting the admission to the colony of 



COLONIAL DEMOCBACY. 47 

convicts for three years after they had received their 
pardons ; but the English race here is not Latinized as 
it is in America. If it were, Australian democracy 
would not be so "shocking" to the squatters. De- 
mocracy, like Mormonism, would be nothing if found 
among Frenchmen or people with black faces, but it 
is at first sight very terrible, when it smiles on you 
from between a pair of rosy Yorkshire cheeks. 

The political are not greater than the social differ- 
ences between Australia and America. Australian 
society resembles English middle-class society; the 
people have, in matters of literature and religion, tastes 
and feelings similar to those which pervade such com- 
munities as those of Birmingham or Manchester. On 
the other hand, the vices of America are those of aris- 
tocracies; her virtues, those of a landed republic. Shop 
and factory are still in the second rank; wheat and 
corn still the prevailing powers. In all the Australian 
colonies land is coming to the front for the second 
time under a system of small holdings, except in Queens- 
land, where it has never ceased to rule, and that under 
an oligarchic form of society and government; but it 
is doubtful whether, looking to the size of Melbourne, 
the landed democracy will ever outvote the townfolk 
in Victoria. 

That men of ability and character are proscribed has 
been one of the charges brought against colonial de- 
mocracy. For my part, I found gathered in Melbourne, 
at the University, at the Observatory, at the Botanical 
Garden, and at the government offices, men of the 
highest scientific attainments, drawn from all parts of 
the world, and tempted to Australia by large salaries 
voted by the democracy. The statesmen of all the 
colonies are well worthy of the posts they hold. Mr. 
Macalister, in Queensland, and Mr. Martin, at Sydney, 



48 GREATER BRITAIN. 

are excellent debaters. Mr. Parkes, whose biography 
would be the t3'pical history of a successful colonist, 
and who has fought his way up from the position of a 
Birmingham artisan free-emigrant to that of Colonial 
Secretary of New South Wales, is an extremely able 
writer and deep thinker. The business powers of the 
present Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales are 
remarkable ; and Mr. Higinbotham, the Attorney- 
General of Victoria, possesses a fund of experience and 
a power of foresight which it would be hard to equal 
at home. Many of the ministers in all the colonies 
are men who have worked themselves up from the 
ranks, and it is amusing to notice the affected horror 
with which their antecedents have been recalled by 
those who have brought out a pedigree from the old 
country. A government clerk in one of the colonies 
told me that the three last ministers at the head of his 
department had been " so low in the social scale, that 
my wife could not visit theirs." ^ 

Class animosity and political feud runs much higher, 
and drives its roots far deeper into private life in Vic- 
toria than in any other English-speaking country I have 
seen. Political men of distinction are shunned by their 
opponents in the streets and clubs ; and, instead of its 
being possible to differ on politics and yet continue 
friends, as in the old country, I have seen men in Vic- 
toria refuse to sit down to dinner with a statesman 
from whose views on land questions they happened to 
dissent. A man once warned me solemnly against 
dining with a quiet grave old gentleman, on the ground 
that he was "a most dangerous radical — a perfect fire- 
brand." 

Treated in this way, it is not strange that the demo- 
cratic ministers and members stand much upon their 
dignity, and colonial Parliaments are in fact not only 



COLONIAL DEMOCEACY. 49 

as haughty as the parent assembly at Westminster, but 
often assert their privileges by the most arbitrary of 
means. A few weeks before I arrived in Melbourne, 
a member of the staff of the Argus newspaper was given 
up by the proprietors to soothe the infuriated Assembly. 
Having got him, the great question of what to do with 
him arose, and he was placed in a vault with a grated 
window, originally built for prisoners of the House, but 
which had been temporarily made use of as a coal-hole. 
Such a disturbance was provoked by the alleged bar- 
barity of this proceeding, that the prisoner was taken 
to a capital room up stairs, where he gave dinner-par- 
ties every day. His opponents said the great difficulty 
was to get rid of him, for he seemed to be permanently 
located in the Parliamenc-house, and that, when they 
ordered his liberation, his friends insisted that it should 
not take place until he had been carried down to the 
coal-hole cell which he had occupied the first day, and 
there photographed "through the dungeon bars" as 
the "martyr of the Assembly." 

Though both Victoria and JSTew South Wales are 
democratic, there is a great difference between the 
two democracies. In New South Wales, I found not 
a democratic so much as a mixed country, containing 
a large and wealthy class with aristocratic prejudices, 
but governed by an intensely democratic majorit}^ — a 
country not unlike the State of Maryland. On the 
other hand, the interest which attaches to the political 
condition of Victoria is extreme, since it probably pre- 
sents an accurate view, "in little," of the state of 
society which will exist in England, after many steps 
toward social democracy have been taken, but before 
the nation as a whole has become completely demo- 
cratic. 

One of the best features of the colonfal democracy is 

VOL. II. 5 



50 GREATER BRITAIN. 

its earnestness in the cause of education. In England 
it is one of our worst national peculiarities that, what- 
ever our station, we either are content with giving 
children an "education" which is absolutely wanting 
in any real training for the mind, or aid to the brain in 
its development, or else we give them a schooling which 
is a mere preparation for the Bar or Church, for it has 
always been considered with us that it is a far greater 
matter to be a solicitor or a curate than to be wise or 
happy. This is, of course, a consequence partly of the 
energy of the race, and partly of our aristocratic form 
of society, which leads every member of a class to be 
continually trying to get into the class immediately 
above it in wealth or standing. In the colonies, as in 
the United States, the democratic form which society 
has taken has carried with it the continental habit of 
thought upon educational matters, so that it would 
seem as though the form of society influenced this 
question much more than the energy of the race, which 
is rather heightened than depressed in these new coun- 
tries. The English Englishman says, *'If I send Dick 
to a good school, and scrape up money enough to put 
him into a profession, even if he don't make much, at 
least he'll be a gentleman." The Australian or demo- 
cratic Englishman says, " Tom must have good school- 
ing, and must make the most of it; but I'll not have 
him knocking about in broadcloth, and earning no- 
thing ; so no profession for him ; but let him make 
money like me, and mayhap get a few acres more land." 
Making allowance for the thinness of population in 
the bush, education in Victoria is extremely general 
among the children, and is directed by local commit- 
tees with success, although the members of the boards 
are often themselves destitute of all knowledge except 
that which tells them that education will do their chil- 



COLONIAL DEMOCRACY. 51 

ciren good. Mr. Geary, an inspector of schools, told 
the Commissioners that he had examined one school 
where not a single member of the local committee 
could write; but these immigrant fathers do their duty 
honestly toward the children for all their" ignorance, 
and there is every chance that the schools will grow 
and grow until their influence on behalf of freedom 
becomes as marked in Victoria as ever it has been in 
Massachusetts. Education has a great advantage in 
countries w^iere political rights are widely extended: 
in the colonies, as in America, there is a spirit of 
political life astir throughout the country, and news- 
papers and public meetings continue an education 
throughout life which in England ceases at twelve, 
and gives place to driving sheep to paddocks, and 
shouting at rooks in a wheat-held. 

There is nothing in the state of the Victorian schools 
to show what will be the type of the next generation, 
but there are many reasons for believing that the pres- 
ent disorganization of colonial society will only cease 
with the attainment of complete democracy or absolute 
equality of conditions, which must be produced by 
the already completely democratic institutions in little 
more than a generation. The squatter class will dis- 
appear as agriculture drives sheep-farming from the 
held, and, on the other hand, the town democracy will 
adopt a tone of manly independence instead of one of 
brag and bluster, when education makes them that 
which at present they are not — the equals of the 
wealthy farmers. 

It has been justly pointed out that one of the worst 
dangers of democracy is the crushing influence of pub- 
lic opinion upon individuality, and many who have 
written upon America have assumed that the tendency 
has already manifested itself there. I had during my 



52 GREATER BRITAIN. 

stay in the United States arrived at the contrary opinion, 
and come to believe that in no country in the world is 
eccentricity, moral and religious, so ripe as in America, 
in no country individuality more strong; but, ascribing 
to intermixture of foreign blood this apparently abnor- 
mal departure from the assumed democratic shape of 
society, I looked forward to the prospect of seeing the 
overwhelming force of the opinion of the majority ex- 
hibited in all its hideousness in the democratic colonies. 
I was as far from discovering the monster as 1 had been 
in America, for I soon found that, although there may 
be little intellectual unrest in Australia, there is mar- 
velous variety of manners. 

There is in our colonies no trace of that multiplica- 
tion of creeds which characterizes America, and which 
is said to be everywhere the result of the abolition of 
Establishments. In Victoria, eighty per cent, of the 
whites belong to either Episcopalians, Catholics, or 
Presbyterians, and almost all of the remainder to the 
well-known English Churches; nothing is heard of 
such sects as the hundreds that have sprung up in 
I^ew England — Ilopldnsians, Universalists, Osgoodites, 
Kogerenes, Come Outers, Non-E-esistants, and the like. 
The Australian democrat likes to pray as his father 
prayed before him, and is strongly conservative in his 
ecclesiastical affairs. It maj' be the absence in Aus- 
tralia of enthusiastic religion which accounts for the 
want among the country-folk of the peculiar gentle- 
aess of manner which distiiiguishes the farmer in 
America. Climate may have its effect upon the voice; 
the influence of the Puritan and Quaker in the early 
history of the thirteen States, when manners were 
moulded and the national lifeshapedfor good or harm, 
may have permanently affected the descendants of the 
early settlers; but everywhere in America I noticed 



COLONIAL DEMOCBACY. 53 

that the most perfect dignity and repose of manner 
was found in districts where the passionate religious 
systems had their strongest hold. 

There is no trace in the colonies at present of that 
love for general ideas which takes America away from 
England in philosophy, and sets her with the Latin 
and Celtic races on the side of France. The tendency 
is said to follow on democracy, but it would be better 
said that democracy is itself one of these general ideas. 
Democracy in the colonies is at present an accident, 
and nothing more ; it rests upon no basis of reasoning, 
but upon a fact. The first settlers were active, bust- 
ling men of fairly even rank or w^ealth, none of whom 
could brook the leadership of any other. The only 
way out of the difficulty was the adoption of the rule 
*'A11 of us to be equal, and the majority to govern;" 
but there is no conception of the nature of democracy, 
as the unfortunate Chinese have long since discovered. 
The colonial democrats understood ''democracy" as 
little as the party which takes the name in the United 
States; but there is at present no such party in the 
colonies as the great Republican party of America. 

Democracy cannot always remain an accident in 
iVustralia : where once planted, it never fails to ^x its 
roots ; but even in America its growth has been ex- 
tremely slow. There is at present in Victoria and !New 
South Wales a general admission among the men of 
the existence of equality of conditions, together w^ith a 
perpetual rebellion on the part of their wives to defeat 
democracj', and to reintroduce the old " colonial court" 
society, and resulting class divisions. The consequence 
of this distinction is that the women are mostly en- 
gaged in elbowing their way; while among their hus- 
bands there is no such thing as the pretending to a 
style, a culture, or a wealth that the pretender does 

5* 



54 GREATER BRITAIN. 

not possess, for the reason that no male colonist ad- 
mits the possibility of the existence of a social superior. 
Like the American "democrat," the Australian will 
admit that there may be any number of grades below 
him, so long as you allow that he is at the top; but no 
republican can be stauncher in the matter of his own 
equality with the best. 

There is no sign that in Austraha any more than in 
America there will spring up a center of opposition to 
the dominant majority; but there is as little evidence 
that the majority will even unwittingly abuse its power. 
It is the fashion to say that for a State to be intel- 
lectually great and noble there must be within it a 
nucleus of opposition to the dominant principles of the 
time and place, and that the best and noblest minds, 
the intellects the most seminal, have invariably be- 
longed to men who formed part of such a group. It 
ma}^ be doubted whether this assumed necessity for 
opposition to the public will is not characteristic of a 
terribly imperfect state of society and government. It 
is chiefly because the world has never had experience 
of a national life at once throbbing with the pulse of 
the whole people, and completely tolerant not only in 
law but in opinion of sentiments the most divergent 
from the views of the majorit}^ — firm in the pursuit of 
truths already grasped, but ready to seize with avidity 
upon new; gifted with a love of order, yet ready to fit 
itself to shiftins: circumstances — that men continue to 
look with complacency upon the enormous waste of 
intellectual power that occurs when a germ of truth 
such as that contained in the doctrines of the Puritans 
finds development and acceptance only after centuries 
have passed. 

Australia will start unclogged by slavery to try this 
experiment for the world. 



PROTECTION. 55 



CHAPTER YL 

PROTECTION. 

The greatest of all democratic stumbling-blocks is 
said to be Protection. 

*' Encourage native industry I" the colonial shop- 
keepers write up; "Show your patriotism, and buy 
colonial goods!" is painted in huge letters on a shop- 
front at Castlemaine. In England, some unscrupulous 
traders, we are told, wTite "From Paris" over their 
English goods, but such dishonesty in Victoria takes 
another shape; there we have "Warranted colonial 
made" placed over imported wares, for many will pay 
a higher price for a colonial product confessedly not 
more than equal to the foreign, such is the rage for 
Kative Industry, and the hatred of the "Antipodean 
doctrine of Free Trade." 

Many former colonists who live at home persuade 
themselves, and unfortunately persuade also the public 
in England, that the Protectionists are weak in the 
colonies. So far is this from being the case in either 
Victoria or i^ew South Wales, that in the former 
colony I found that in the Lower House the Free 
Traders formed but three-elevenths of the Assembly, 
and in New South Wales the pastoral tenants of the 
crown may be said to stand alone in their support of 
Free Trade. Some of the squatters go so far as to 
declare that none of the public men of the colonies 
really believe in the advantages of Protection, but that 
they dishonestly accept the principle, and undertake 



56 GREATER BRITAIN, 

to act upon it when in office, in order to secure the 
votes of an ignorant majority of laborers, who are 
themselves convinced that Protection means high 
wages. 

It would seem as though we Free Traders had be- 
come nearly as bigoted in favor of Free Trade as our 
former opponents w^ere in favor of Protection. Just 
as they used to say " We are right; why argue the 
question?" so now, in face of the support of Protec- 
tion by all the greatest minds in America, all the first 
statesmen of the Australias, we tell the i^ew England 
and the Australian politicians that we will not discuss 
Protection with them, because there can be no two 
minds about it among men of intelligence and educa- 
tion. We will hear no defense of national lunacy," 
we say. 

If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue 
with an Australian or American Protectionist, we find 
ourselves in difficulties. All the ordinary arguments 
against the compelling people by act of Parliament to 
consume a dearer or inferior article are admitted as 
soon as they are urged. If you attempt to, prove that 
Protection is bolstered up by those whose private in- 
terests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd Aus- 
tralian diggers and the calculating Western farmers 
in America — men whose pocket interest is wholly op- 
posed to Protection, and who yet, almost to a man, 
support it. A digger at Ballarat defended Protection 
to me in this way : he said he knew that under a pro- 
tective tariff he had to pay dearer than would other- 
wise be the case for his jacket and his moleskin trow- 
sers, but that he preferred to do this, as by so doing 
he aided in building up in the colony such trades as 
the making up of clothes, in which his brother and 
other men physically too weak to be diggers could 



PBOTECTION. 57 

gain an honest living. In short, the self-denying Pro- 
tection of the Australian diggers is of the character of 
that which would be accorded to the glaziers of a town 
by the citizens, if they broke their windows to find 
their fellow-townsmen work: "We know we lose, but 
men must live," they say. At the same time they 
deny that the loss will be enduring. The digger tells 
you that he should not mind a continuing pocket loss, 
but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an old 
country would be pocket loss, in a new country such 
as his only comes to this — that it forms a check on im- 
migration. Wages being 65. a day in Victoria and 85. 
a day in England, workmen would naturally flock into 
Victoria from England until wages in Melbourne fell 
to 85. Qd. or As. Here comes in prohibition, and by 
increasing the cost of living in Victoria, and cutting 
into the Australian handicraftsman's margin of lux- 
uries, and reducing his wages to 45., diminishes the 
temptation to immigration, and consequently the in- 
flux itself. 

The Western farmers in America, I have heard, de- 
fend Protection upon far wider grounds : they admit 
that Free Trade would conduce to the most rapid pos- 
sible peopling of their country with foreign immi- 
grants ; but this, they say, is an eminently undesirable 
conclusion. They prefer to pay a heavy tax in the 
increased price of everything they consume, and in the 
greater cost of labor, rather than see their country 
denationalized by a rush of Irish or Germans, or their 
political institutions endangered by a still further in- 
crease in the size and power of I^ew York. One old 
fellow said to me : " I don't want the Americans in 
1900 to be 200 millions, but I want them to be happy." 

The American Protectionists point to the danger 
that their countrymen would run unless town kept 



58 GREATER BRITAIN. 

pace with country population. Settlers would pour off 
to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land hy 
cropping it year after year without fallow, without 
manure, and then, as the land became in a few j^ears 
exhausted, would have nowhere whither to turn to 
find the fertilizers w^hich the soil would need. Were 
they to depend upon agriculture alone, they w^ould 
sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them 
a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil, open to 
future settlement, when its lands should have recovered 
their fertility, by some other and more provident race. 
The coasthmds of most ancient countries are exhausted, 
densely bushed, and uninhabited. In this fact lies the 
power of our sailor race : crossing the seas, we occupy 
the coasts, and step by step work our way into the 
upper country, where we should not have attempted 
to show ourselves had the ancient population resisted 
us upon the shores. In India, in Ceylon, we met the 
hardy race of the highlands and interior only after we 
had already fixed ourselves upon the coast, with a safe 
basis for our supply. The fate that these countries 
have met is that which colonists expect to be their 
own, unless the protective system be carried out in its 
entirety. In like manner the Americans point to the 
ruin of Virginia, and if you urge "slavery," answer, 
"slavery iiS but agriculture." 

Those who speak of the selfishness of the Protection- 
ists as a whole, can never have taken the trouble to 
examine into the arguments by which Protection is 
supported in Australia and America. In these coun- 
tries, Protection is no mere national delusion; it is a 
system deliberately adopted with open eyes as one 
conducive to the country's welfare, in spite of objec- 
tions known to all, in spite of pocket losses that come 
home to all. If it be, as we in England believe, a folly, 



PROTECTION. 59 

it is at all events a sublime one, full of self-sacrifice, 
illustrative of a certain nobility in the national heart. 
The Australian diffsrers and Western farmers in Amer- 
ica are setting a grand example to the world of self- 
sacrifice for a national object; hundreds of thousands 
of rough men are content to live — they and their fami- 
lies — upon less than they might otherwise enjoy, in 
order that the condition of the mass of their country- 
men may continue raised above that of their brother 
toilers in Old England. Their manufactures are be- 
ginning now to stand alone, but hi-therto, without Pro- 
tection, the Americans would have had no cities but 
seaports. By picturing to ourselves England dependent 
upon the City of London, upon Liverpool, and Hull, 
and Bristol, we shall see the necessity the Western 
men are now under of setting off Pittsburg against 
!N^ew York and Philadelphia. In short, the tendency, 
according to the Western farmers, of Free Trade, in 
the early stages of a country's existence, is to promote 
universal centralization, to destrov local centers and 
the commerce they create, to so tax the farmer with 
the cost of transport to the distant centers, conse- 
quent upon the absence of local markets, that he can 
grow but wheat and corn continuously, and cannot 
but exhaust his soil. With markets so distant, the 
richest forest lands are not worth clearing, and a wave 
of settlement sweeps over the country, occupying 
the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once 
more. 

Protection in the colonies and America is to a great 
degree a revolt against steam. Steam is making the 
w^orld all one; steam "corrects" differences in the 
price of labor. When steam brings all races into com- 
petition with each other, the cheaper races will ex- 
tinguish the dearer, till at last some one people will 



inhabit the whole earth. Coal remains the only power, 
as it will probably always be cheaper to carry the 
manufactured goods than to carry the coal. 

Time after time I have heard the Western farmers 
draw imaginary pictures of the state of America if Free 
Trade should gain the day, and asking of what avail it 
is to say that Free Trade and free circulation of people 
is profitable to the pocket, if it destroys the national 
existence of America ; what good to point out the gain 
of weight to their purses, in the face of the destruction 
of their religion, their language, and their Saxon insti- 
tutions. 

One of the greatest of the thinkers of America de- 
fended Protection to me on the following grounds: 
That without Protection, America could at present 
have but few and limited manufactures. That a nation 
cannot properly be said to exist as such, unless she has 
manufactures of many kinds ; for men are born, some 
with a turn to agriculture, some with a turn to mechan- 
ics; and if you force the mechanic by nature to become 
a farmer, he will make a bad farmer, and the nation 
will lose the advantage of all his power and invention. 
That the whole of the possible employments of the 
human race are in a measure necessary employments 
— necessary to the making up of a nation. That every 
concession to Free Trade cuts out of all chance of 
action some of the faculties of the American national 
mind, and, so doing, weakens and debases it. That 
each and every class of workers is of such importance 
to the country, that we must make any sacrifice neces- 
sary to maintain them in full work. "The national 
mind is manifold," he said; ''and if you do not keep 
up every branch of employment in every district, you 
waste the national force. If we were to remain a 
purely agricultural people, land would fall into fewer 



and fewer bauds, and our people become more and 
more brutalized as the years rolled on." 

It must not be supposed that Protection is entirely 
defended upon these strange new grounds. *'Save us 
from the pauper-labor of Europe," is the most recent 
as well as the oldest of Protectionist cries. The Aus- 
tralians and Americans say, that by working women at 
1^. a day in the mines in Wales, and by generally de- 
grading all laborers under the rank of highly- skilled 
artisans, the British keep wages so low, that, in spite oi 
the cost of carriage, they can almost invariably under- 
sell the colonists and Americans in American and Aus- 
tralian markets. This state of degradation and poverty 
nothing can force tbem to introduce into their own coun- 
tries, and, on the other hand, they consider the iron 
manufacture necessary for the national purpose alluded 
to before. The alternative is Protection. 

The most unavoidable of all the difficulties of Pro- 
tection — namely, that no human government can ever 
be trusted to adjust protective taxation without cor- 
ruption — is no objection to the prohibitions which the 
Western Protectionists demand. The !N'ew Englanders 
say — ''Let us meet the English on fair terms;" the 
Western men say that they will not meet them at all. 
Some of the New York Protectionists declare that their 
object is merely the fostering of American manufac- 
tures until they are able to stand alone, the United 
States not having at present reached the point which 
had been attained by other nations when they threw 
Protection to the winds. Such halting Protectionists 
as these manufacturers find no sympathy in Australia 
or the West, although the highest of all Protectionists 
look forward to the distant time when, local centers 
being everywhere established, customs will be abolished 
on all sides, and mankind form one great family. 

VOL. II, 6 



The chief thins: to be borne in mind in discussina 
Protection with an Australian or an American is that 
he never thinks of denying that under Protection he 
pays a higher price for his goods than he would if he 
bought them from us, and that he admits at once that 
he temporarily pays a tax of 15 or 20 per cent, upon 
everything he buys in order to help set his country on 
the road to national unity and ultimate wealth. With- 
out Protection, the American tells you, there will be 
commercial ISTew York, sugar-growing Louisiana, the 
corn-growing l^orthwest, but no America. Protection 
alone can give him a united country. When we talk 
about things being to the advantage or disadvantage 
of a country, the American Protectionist asks what 
you mean. Admitting that all you say against Pro- 
tection may be true, he says that he had sooner see 
America supporting a hundred millions independent 
of the remainder of the world than two hundred mil- 
lions dependent for clothes upon the British. "You, 
on the other hand," he says, "would prefer our cus- 
tom. How can we discuss the question ? The differ- 
ence between us is radical, and we have no base on 
wliich to build." 

It is a common doctrine in the colonies of England 
that a nation cannot be called " independent" if it has 
to cry out to another for supplies of necessaries ; that 
true national existence is first attained when the coun- 
try becomes capable of supplying to its own citizens 
those goods without which they cannot exist in the 
state of comfort which they have already reached. 
Political is apt to follow upon commercial dependency, 
they say. 

The question of Protection is bound up with the 
wider one of whether we are to love our fellow-subjects, 
our race, or the world at large ; whether we are to pur- 



sue our country's good at the expense of other nations? 
There is a growing belief in Enghxnd that the noblest 
philosophy is to deny the existence of the moral right 
to benefit ourselves by harming others ; that love of 
mankind must in time replace love of race as that has 
in part replaced narrow patriotism and love of self. It 
would seem that our Free Trade system lends itself 
better to these wide modern sympathies than does Pro- 
tection. On the other hand, it may be argued that, if 
every State consults the good of its own citizens, we 
shall, by the action of all nations, obtain the desired 
happiness of the whole world, and that, with rapidity, 
from the reason that every country understands its own 
interests better than it does those of its neis^hbor. As 
a rule, the colonists hold that they should not protect 
themselves against the sister-colonies, but only against 
the outer world; and while I was in Melbourne an ar- 
rangement was made with respect to the border cus- 
toms between Victoria and Xew South Wales; but this 
is at present the only step that has been taken toward 
intercolonial Free Trade. 

It is passing strange that Victoria should be noted 
for the eagerness with which her people seek Protec- 
tion. Possessed of little coal, they appear to be at- 
tempting artificially to create an industry which, owing 
to this sad lack of fuel, must languish from the mo- 
ment that it is let alone. Syduey coal sells in Mel- 
bourne at thirty shillings a ton ; at the pit's-mouth at 
ISTewcastle, New South Wales, it fetches only seven or 
eight shillings. With regard, however, to the making- 
up of native produce, the question in the case of Vic- 
toria is merely this: Is it cheaper to carry the wool to 
the coal, and then the woolen goods back again, than 
to carry the coal to the wool ? and as long as Victoria 
can continue to export wheat, so that the coal-ships 



may not want freight, wool manufactures may proba- 
bly prosper in Victoria. 

The Victorians naturally deny that the cost of coal 
has much to do with the question. The French man- 
ufacturers, they point out, with dearer coal, but with 
cheaper labor, have in many branches of trade beaten 
the English out of common markets, but then under 
Protection there is no chance of cheap labor in Vic- 
toria. 

Writing for the Englishmen of Old England, it is 
not necessary for me to defend Free Trade by any 
arguments. As far as we in our island are concerned, 
it is so manifestly to the pocket interest of almost all 
of us, and at the same time, on account of the minute- 
ness of our territory, so little dangerous politically, 
that for Britain there can be no danger of a deliberate 
relapse into Protection ; although we have but little 
right to talk about Free Trade so long as we continue 
our enormous subsidies to the Ounard liners. 

The American argument in favor of Prohibition is 
in the main, it will be seen, political, the economical 
objections being admitted, but outweighed. Our ac- 
tion in the matter of our postal contracts, as in the 
case of the Factory acts, at all events shows that we 
are not ourselves invariably averse to distinguish be- 
tween the political and the economical aspect of certain 
questions. 

My duty has been to chronicle what is said and 
thought upon the matter in our various plantations. 
One thing at least is clear — that even if the opinions 
I have recorded be as ridiculous when applied to Aus- 
tralia or America as they would be when applied to 
England, they are not supported by a selfish clique, 
but rest upon the generosity and self-sacrifice of a 
majority of the population. 



CHAPTER YII. 

LABOR. 

Side by side with the unselfish Protectionism of the 
diggers there flourishes among the artisans of the Aus- 
tralias a self-interested desire for non-intercourse with 
the outside world. 

In America, the working men, themselves almost 
without exception immigrants, though powerful in the 
various States from holding the balance of parties, 
have never as yet been able to make their voices heard 
in the Federal Congress. In the chief Australian 
colonies, on the other hand, the artisans have, more 
than any other class, the possession of political power. 
Throughout the world the grievance of the working 
classes lies in the fact that, while trade and profits have 
increased enormously within the last few years, true as 
distinguished from nominal wages have not risen. It 
is even doubted whether the American or British han- 
dicraftsman can now live in such comfort as he could 
make sure of a few years back : it is certain that ae-ri- 
cultural laborers in the south of England are worse off 
than they were ten years ago, although the deprecia- 
tion of gold prevents us from accurately gauging their 
true position. In Victoria and iN'ew South Wales, and 
in the States of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, where 
the artisans possess some share of power, they have set 
about the attempt to remedy by law the grievance under 
which they 8ufi;er. In the American States, where the 
suppression of immigration seems almost impossible^ 

6* 



their interference takes the shape of eight-hour hills, 
and exclusion of colored laborers. There is no trades 
union in America which will admit to memhership a 
Chinaman, or even a mulatto. In Victoria and New 
South Wales, however, it is not difficult quietly to put a 
check upon the importation of foreign labor. The vast 
distance from Europe makes the unaided immigration 
of artisans extremely rare, and since the democrats 
have been in power the funds for assisted immigration 
have been withheld, and the Chinese influx all but for- 
bidden, while manifestoes against the ordinary Euro- 
pean immigration have repeatedly been published at 
Sydney by the Council of the Associated Trades. 

The Sydney operatives have always taken a leading 
part in opposition to immigration, from the time when 
they founded the Anti-Transportation Committee up 
to the present day. In 1847, a natural and proper 
wish to prevent the artificial depression of wages was 
at the bottom of the anti-transportation movement, 
although the arguments made use of in the petition to 
the Queen were of the most general character, and 
Sydney mechanics, many of them free immigrants 
themselves, say that there is no difference of principle 
between the introduction of free or assisted immisrrants 
and that of convicts. 

If we look merel}^ to the temporary results of the 
policy of the Australian artisans, we shall find it hard 
to deny that their acts are calculated momentarily to 
increase their material prosperity ; so far they may be 
selfish, but thej^ are not blind. Admitting that wages 
depend on the ratio of capital to population, the Aus- 
tralians assert that, with them, population increases 
faster than capital, and that hindering immigration 
will restore the balance. Prudential checks on popu- 
lation are useless, they say, in face of Irish immigra- 



tion. At the same time, it is clear that, from the dis- 
couragement of immigration and limitation to eight 
hours of the daily toil, there results an exceptional 
scarcity of labor, which cramps the development of 
the country, and causes a depression in trade which 
must soon diminish the wage-fund, and react upon 
the working men. It is unfortunately the fact, that 
colonial artisans do not sufficiently bear in mind the 
distinction between real and nominal wages, but are 
easily caught by the show of an extra few shillings a 
week, even though the purchasing power of each shil- 
ling be diminished by the change. When looked into, 
" higher wages" often mean that the laborer, instead 
of starving upon ten shillings a week, is for the future 
to starve upon twenty. 

As regards the future, contrasted with the tempo- 
rary condition of the Australian laborer, there is no 
disscuisinsc the fact that mere exclusion of imnii aeration 
will not in the long run avail him. It might, of course, 
be urged that immigration is, even in America, a small 
matter by the side of the natural increase of the peo- 
ple, and that to shut out the immigrant is but one of 
many checks to population; but in Australia the natural 
increase is not so great as in a young country might 
be expected. The men so largely outnumber the 
women in Australia, that even early marriages and 
large families cannot make the birth-rate very high, 
and fertile land being at present still to be obtained at 
first hand, the new agricultural districts swallow up 
the natural increase of the population. Still, import- 
ant as is immigration at this moment, ultimately 
through the influx of women — to which the democrats 
are not opposed — or, more slowly, by the efibrt of na- 
ture to restore the balance of the sexes, the rate of 
natural increase will become far greater in Australia. 



"Ultimately, there can be uo doubt, if the Australian 
laborer continues to retain his present standard of com- 
fort, prudential checks upon the birth of children will 
be requisite to maintain the present ratio of capital to 
population. 

Owing to the comparatively high prices fixed for 
agricultural land in the three southeastern colonies of 
Australia, the abundance of unoccupied tracts has not 
hitlierto had that influence on wages in Australia 
which it appears to have exercised in America, but 
under the democratic amendments of the existinfic free 
selection system, wages will probably again rise in the 
colonies, to be once more reduced by immigration, or, 
if the democracy gains the day, more slowly lowered 
by the natural increase of the population. 

In places where competition has reduced the reward 
of labor to the lowest amount consistent with the effi- 
ciency of the work, compulsory restriction of the hours 
of toil must evidently be an unmixed benefit to the 
' laborer, until carried to the point at which it destroys 
the trade in which he is engaged. In America and 
Australia, however, where the laborer has a margin of 
luxuries which can be cut down, and where the manu- 
facturers are still to some extent competing with Euro- 
pean rivals, restriction of hours puts them at a disad- 
vantage with the capitalists of the old world, and, 
reducing their profits, tend also to diminish the wage- 
fund, and ultimately to decrease the wages of their 
men. The colonial action in this matter may, never- 
theless, like all infringements of general economic 
laws, be justified by proof of the existence of a higher 
necessity for breaking than for adhering to the rule of 
freedom. Our own Factory Acts, we should remem- 
ber, were undoubtedly calculated to diminish the pro- 
duction of the country. 



Were the American and Australian handicraftsmen 
to become sufficiently powerful to combine strict Pro- 
tection, or prohibition of foreign intercourse, with re- 
duction of hours of toil, they would ultimately drive 
capital out of their countries, and either lower wages, 
or else diminish the population by checking both im- 
migration and natural increase. Here, as in the con- 
sideration of Protection, we come. to that bar to all dis- 
cussion, the question, "What is a nation's good ?" It 
is at least doubtful whether in England we do not 
attach too great importance to the continuance of na- 
tions in "the progressive state." Unrestricted immi- 
gration may destroy the literature, the traditions, the 
nationality itself of the invaded country, and it is a 
question whether these ideas are not worth preserving 
even at a cost of a few figures in the returns of imports, 
exports, and population. A country in which Free Trade 
principles have been carried to their utmost logical 
development must be cosmopolitan and nationless, and 
for such a state of things to exist universally without 
danger to civilization the world is not 3'et prepared. 

"Know-nothingism" in America, as what is now 
styled "native Americanism " was once called — a form 
of the protest against the exaggeration of Free Trade — 
was founded by handicraftsmen, and will in all proba- 
bility find its main support within their ranks when- 
ever the time for its inevitable resuscitation shall arrive. 
That there is honest pride of race at the bottom of the 
agitation no one can doubt who knows the history of 
the earlier Know-nothing movement; but class interest 
happens to point the same way as does the instinct of 
the race. The refusal of political privileges to immi- 
grants will undoubtedly have some tendency to check 
the fiow of immigration; at all events, it will check 
the self-assertion of the immigrants. That which does 



tins leaves, too, the control of wages more within the 
hands ot actual laborers, and prevents the European 
laborers of the eleventh hour coming in to share the 
heightened wages for which the American hands have 
struck, and suifered misery and want. IN^o consistent 
republican can object to the •making ten or twenty 
years' residence in the United States the condition for 
citizenship of the land. 

In the particular case of the Australian colonies, 
they are happily separated from Ireland by seas so 
wide as to have a chance of preserving a distinct 
nationality, such as America can scarcely hope for: 
only 1500 persons have come to J^ew South "VValee, 
unassisted, in the last five years. The burden of proof 
lies upon those who propose to destroy the rising 
nationality by assisting the importation of a mixed 
multitude of negroes, Chinamen, Hill-coolies, Irish, 
and Germans, in order that the imports and exports 
of Victoria and New South Wales may be increased, 
and that there may be a larger number of so-called 
Victorians and 'New South Welsh to live in misery. 

Owing to the fostering of immigration by the aristo- 
cratic government, the population of Queensland had, 
in 1866, quadrupled itself since 1860; but, even were 
the other colonies inclined to follow the example of 
their northern sister, they could not do so with success. 
New South Wales and Tasmania might import col- 
onists by the thousand, but they would be no sooner 
landed than they would run to Queensland, or sail to 
the New Zealand diggings, just as the "Canadian im- 
migrants" flock into the United States. 

That phase of the labor question to which I have 
last alluded seems to shape itself into the question, 
" Shall the laborer always and everywhere be en- 
couraged or permitted to carry his labor to the best 



market: 1 he Anstrahang answer that they are will- 
ing to acluiit that additional hands in a new country 
mean additional wealth, hut that there is hut little 
good in our preaching moral restraint to them if Eu- 
ropean immigration is to he encouraged, Chinese 
allowed. The only effect, they say, that self-control 
can have is that of giving such children as they do 
rear Chinamen or Irishmen to struggle against instead 
of brothers. It is hopeless to expect that the Austra- 
lian workmen will retain their present high standard 
of comfort if an influx of dard-skiuned handicrafts- 
men is permitted. 

Some ten or even fewer years ago, we Free Traders 
of the Western world, lirst then coming to know some 
little about the kingdoms of the further East, paused a 
moment in our daily toil to lift to the skies our hands 
in lamentation at the blind exclusiveness which we 
were told had for ages past held sway within the 
council chambers of Pekin. No words were too stronsT 
for our new-found laughing-stock; China became for 
us what we are to Parisian journalists — a Boeotia re- 
deemed only by a certain eccentricity of folly. This 
vast hive swarming with two hundred million working 
bees was said to tind its interest in shutting out the 
world, punishing alike wdth death the outgoing and 
incoming of the people. *' China for the Chinese" 
was the common w^ar-cry of the rulers and the ruled; 
*' Self-contained has China been, and prospered ; self- 
contained she shall continue," the favorite maxim of 
their teachers. Nothing could be conceived nobler 
than the scorn which mingled with half- doubting 
incredulity and with Pharisaic thanking of heaven 
that we were not as they, when the blindness of these 
outer barbarians of ^' Gog and Magog land " was drawn 
for us by skillful pens, and served out to us with all 



the comments that self-complacency could suggest. 
A conversion in the future was foretold, however; this 
Chinese infirmity of vision should not last forever; the 
day, we were told, must come when Studentships in 
Political Economy should be founded in Pekin, and 
Kicardo take the place of Cou-fou-chow in Thibetian 
schools. A conversion has taken place of late, but not 
that hoped for ; or, if it be a conversion consistent with 
the truths of Economic Science, it has taken a strange 
shape. The wise men of Canton may be tempted, 
perhaps, to think that it is we who have learnt the 
wisdom of the sages, and been brought back into the 
fold of the great master. Chinese immigration is 
heavily taxed in California; taxed to the point of pro- 
hibition in Victoria; and absolutely forbidden under 
heav}^ penalties in Louisiana and the other ex-rebel 
States. 

The Chinaman is pushing himself to the fore 
wherever his presence is not prohibited. We find 
Chinese helmsmen and quartermasters in the service 
of the Messageries and Oriental companies receiving 
twice the wages paid to Indian Lascars. We hear of 
the importation of Chinese laborers into India for rail- 
way and for drainage works. The Chinaman has great 
vitality. Of the cheap races the Mongol seems the 
most pushing, the likeliest to conquer in the fight. It 
would almost seem as though we were wrong in our 
common scales of preference, far from right in our use 
of the terms *' superior" and "inferior" races. 

A well-taught white man can outreasoii or can over- 
reach a well-taught Chinaman or negro. But under 
some climatic conditions, the negro can outwork the 
white man; under almost all conditions, the Chinaman 
can outwork him. Where this is the case, is it not the 
Chinaman or the negro that should be called the better 



man : uaii mm wnat we may, wui De not prove nis 
superiority by working the Englishman otf the soil? 
In Florida and Mississippi the black is certainly the 
j^etter man. 

Many Victorians, even those who respect and admire 
the Chinese, are in favor of the imposition of a tax 
upon the yellow immigrants, in order to prevent the 
destruction of the rising Australian nationality. They 
fear that otherwise they will live to see the English 
element swamped in the Asiatic throughout Australia. 
It is not certain that we may not some day have to en- 
counter a similar danger in Old England. 

It will be seen from the account thus given of the 
state of the labor question in Australia, that the 
colonial handicraftsmen stand toward those of the 
world in much the same relative position as that held 
by the members of a trade union toward the other 
workmen of the same trade. The limitation of immi- 
gration there has much the same effects as the limita- 
tion of apprentices in a single trade in England. It is 
easy to say that the difference between fellow-country- 
man and foreigner is important; that while it is an un- 
fairness to all English workmen that English hatters 
should limit apprentices, it is not unfair to English 
hatters that, Australian hatters should limit their ap- 
prentices. For my own part, I am inclined to think 
that, fair or unfair — and we have no international 
moral rule generally acknowledged to decide the ques- 
tion — we might at least say to Australia that, while 
^he throws upon us the chief expenses of her defense, 
she is hardly in a position to refuse to aid our emi- 
grants. 

Day by day the labor question in its older aspects 
becomes of less and less importance. The relationship 
of master and servant is rapidly dying the death ; co- 

VOL. II. 7 



operative tarming and industrial partnersliipM must 
supersede it everywhere at no distant date. In these 
systems we shall iind the remedy against the decline 
of trade with which the English-speaking countries ot 
the earth are threatened. 

The existing system of labor is anti- democratic; it 
is at once productive of and founded on the existence 
of an aristocracy of capital and a servitude of work- 
men ; and our English democracies cannot afford that 
half their citizens should he dependent laborers. If 
manufactures are to be consistent with democracy, 
they must be carried on in shops in which each man 
shall be at once capitalist and handicraftsman. Such 
institutions are already in existence in Massachusetts, 
in Illinois, in Pennsylvania, and in Sydney; while at 
Troy, in Kew York State, there is a great iron foundery, 
owned from roof to floor bv the men who work in it. 
It is not enough that the workman should share in the 
profits. The change which, continuing through the 
middle ages into the present century, has at last every- 
where converted the relation of lord and slave into that 
of master and hireling, is already giving place to the 
silent revolution which is steadily substituting for this 
relationship of capital and labor that of a perfect mar- 
riage, in which the laborer and the capitalist shall be 
one. 

Under this system there can be no strikes, no petty 
trickery, no jealousy, no waste of time. Each man's 
individual interest is coincident with that of all. Where 
the labor is that of a brotherhood, the toil becomes 
ennobled. Were industrial partnerships a new device, 
their inventor would need no monument; his would 
be found in the future historj^ of the race. As it is, 
this latest advance of Western civilization is but a 
return to the earliest and noblest form of labor; the 



Araos, the l^on Uossacks, the Maori tribes are all co- 
operative farmers; it is the mission of the English race 
to apply the ancient principle to manufactures. 



CHAPTER YIII. 

WOMAN. 

In one respect, Victoria stands at once sadly behind 
and strangely in advance of other democratic coun- 
tries. Women, or at least some women, vote at the 
Lower House elections; but, on the other hand, the 
legal position of the sex is almost as inferior to that of 
man as it is in England or the East. 

At an election held some few years ago, female rate- 
payers voted everywhere throughout Victoria. Upon 
examination, it was found that a new registration act 
had directed the rate-books to be used as a basis for 
the preparation of the electoral lists, and that women 
householders had been legally put on the register, 
although the intention of the legislature was not ex- 
pressed, and the question of female voting had not been 
raised during the debates. Another instance, this, of 
the singular way in which in truly British countries 
reforms are brought about by accident, and, when once 
become facts, are allowed to stand. There is no more 
sign of general adhesion in Australia than in England 
to the doctrine which asserts that women, as well as 
men, being interested in good government, should have 
a voice in the selection of that government to which 
they are forced to submit themselves. 



As far as concerns their social position, women are 
as badly off in Australia as in England. Our theory 
of marriage — which has been tersely explained thus : 
*'the husband and wife are one, and the husband is that 
one'' — rules as absolutely at the antipodes as it does in 
Yorkshire. I was daily forced to remember the men 
of Kansas and Missouri, and the widely different view 
they take of these matters to that of the Australians. 
As they used to tell me, they are impatient of seeing 
their women ranked with "lunatics and idiots" in the 
catalogue of incapacities. They are incapable of seeing 
that women are much better represented by their male 
friends than were the Southern blacks by their owners 
or overseers. They believe that the process of election 
would not be more purified by female emancipation 
than would the character of the Parliaments elected. 

The Kansas people often say that if you were told 
that there existed in some ideal country two great sec- 
tions of a race, the members of the one often gross, 
often vicious, often given to loud talking, to swearing, 
to drinking, spitting, chewing, not infrequently cor- 
rupt; those of the other branch, mild, kind, quiet, 
pure, devout, with none of the habitual vices of the 
lirst-named sect, — if you were told that one of these 
branches was alone to elect rulers and to govern, you 
would at once say, ^'Tell us where this happy country 
is that basks in the rule of such a godlike people." 
*'Stop a minute," says your informant, '*it is the creat- 
ures I described first — the men — who rule; the others 
are only women, poor silly fools — imperfect men, I 
assure you ; nothing more." 

It is somewhat the fashion to say that the so-called 
"extravagancies" of the Kansas folk and other Amer- 
ican Western men arise from the extraordinary position 
given to their women by the disproportion of the sexes. 



ISTow in all the Australian colonies the men vastly out- 
number the women, yet the disproportion has none of 
those results which have been attributed to it by some 
writers on America. In ISTew South Wales, the sexes 
are as 250,000 to 200,000, in Victoria 370,000 to 280,000, 
in New Zealand 130,000 to 80,000, in Queensland 
60,000 to 40,000, in Tasmania 50,000 to 40,000, in West 
Australia 14,000 to 8000, 90,000 to 80,000 in South 
Australia. In all our Southern colonies together, there 
are a million of men to only three q-uarters of a million 
of women; yet with all this disproportion, which far 
exceeds that in Western America, not only have the 
women failed to acquire any great share of power, 
political or social, but they are content to occupy a 
position not relatively superior to that held by them at 
home. 

The "Sewing Clubs" of the war-time are at the bot- 
tom of a good deal of the "woman movement" in 
America. At the time of greatest need, the ladies of 
the Northern States formed themselves into associa- 
tions for the supply of lint, of linen, and of comforts 
to the army: the women of a district would meet 
together daily in some large room, and sew, and chat 
while they were sewing. 

The British section of the Teutonic race seems natu- 
rally inclined, through the operation of its old interest- 
begotten prejudices, to rank women where Plato placed 
them in the " Timseus," along with horses and draught 
cattle, or to think of them much as he did when he 
said that all the brutes derived their origin from man 
by a series of successive degradations, of which the 
first was from man to woman. There is, however, one 
strong reason why the English should, in America, 
have laid aside their prejudices upon this point, re- 
taining them in Australia, where the conditions are 

7* 



not the same. Among forming peoples, whose women 
do not work regularly in the field, the woman to 
whom falls the household and superior work is better 
oft* than she is among town-dwelling peoples. The 
Americans are mainly a farming, the Australians and 
British mainly a town-dwelling, people. The absence 
in all sections of our race of regular woman labor in 
the field seems to be a remnant of the high estimation 
in which women were held by our former ancestry. In 
Britain we have, until the last few years, been steadily 
retrograding upon this point. 

It is a serious question howfiir the natural prejudice 
of the EnHish mind asrainst the labor of what we call 
*' inferior races" will be found to extend to half the 
superior race itself. How will English laborers receive 
the inevitable competition of women in many of their 
fields? Woman is at present starved, if she works at 
all, and does not rest content in dependence upon 
some man, by the terrible lowness of wages in every 
employment open to her, and this low rate of wages is 
itself the direct result of the fewness of the occupa- 
tions which society allows her. Where a man can see 
a thousand crafts in which he may engage, a woman 
will perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred 
times as many women as there is room for invade each 
of this small number of employments. In the Aus- 
tralian labor-field the prospects of women are no bet- 
ter than they are in Europe, and during my residence 
in Melbourne the Council of the Associated Trades 
passed a resolution to the eftfect that nothing could 
justify the employment of women in any kind of pro- 
ductive labor. 



CHAPTER IX. 

VICTORIAN PORTS. 

All allowance being made for the great number of 
wide roads for trade, there is still a singular absence of 
traffic in the Melbourne streets. Trade may be said 
to be transacted only upon paper in the city, while the 
tallow, grain, and wool, which form the basis of Aus- 
tralian commerce, do not pass through Melbourne, but 
skirt it, and go by railway to Williamstown, Sandridge, 
and Geelong. 

Geelong, once expected to rival Melbourne, and be- 
come the first port of all Australia, I found grass-grown 
and half deserted, with but one vessel lying at her 
wharf. At Williamstown a great fleet of first-class 
ships was moored alongside the pier. When the gold- 
find at Ballarat took place, Geelong rose fast as the 
digging port, but her citizens chose to complete the 
railway line to Melbourne instead of first opening that 
to Ballarat, and so lost all the up-country trade. Mel- 
bourne, having once obtained the lead, soon managed 
to control the legislature, and grants were made for 
the Echuca Railroad, which tapped the Murray, and 
brought the trade of Upper Queensland and New South 
Wales down to Melbourne, in the interest of the ports 
of Williamstown and Sandridge. JSTot content with 
ruining Geelong, the Melbourne men have set them- 
selves to ridicule it. One of their stories goes that the 
Geelong streets bear such a fine crop of grass, that a 
free selector has applied to have them surveyed and 



sold to him, under the 42d clause of the ISTew Land 
Act. Another story tells how a Geelongee lately died, 
and went to heaven. Peter, opening the door to his 
knock, asked, " Where from ?" ^'Geelong." "Where?" 
said Peter. "Geeloug.*' "There's no such place," 
replied the Apostle. "In Victoria," cried the colonist. 
"Fetch Ham's Australian Atlas," called Peter; and 
when the map was brought and the spot shown to him, 
he replied, ''Well, I beg your pardon, but I really 
never had any one here from that place before." 

If Geelong be standing still, which in a colony is the 
same as rapid decline would be with us, the famed 
wheat country around it seems as inexhaustible as it 
ever was. The whole of the Barrabool range, from 
Ceres to Mount Moriac, is one great golden waving 
sheet, save where it is broken by the stunted claret- 
vineyards. Here and there I came upon a group of 
the little daughters of the German vine-dressers, tend- 
ing and trenching the plants, with the round eyes, rosy 
cheeks, and shiny pigtails of their native Rudesheim. 
all flourishinsc beneath the Southern Cross. 

The colonial vines are excellent ; better, indeed, than 
the growths of California, which, however, they resem- 
ble in general character. The wines are naturally all 
Burgundies, and colonial imitations of claret, port, and 
sherry are detestable, and the hocks but little better. 
The Albury hermitage is a better wine than can be 
bought in Europe at its price, but in some places this 
wine is sold as Murray Burgundy, while the dealers 
foist horrible stuff upon you under the name of her- 
mitage. Of the wines of New South Wales, White 
Dallwood is a fair Saaterne, and White Cawarra a 
good Chablis, while for sweet wines the Chasselas is 
singularly cheap; and the Tokay, the Shiraz, and the 
still Muscat are remarkable. 



I^ortbwest of Geelong, upon the summit of the foot 
bills of the dividing range, lies Ballarat, the head- 
quarters of deep quartz mining, and now no longer 
a diggers' camp, but a graceful city, full of shady 
boulevards and noble buildings, and with a stationary 
population of thirty thousand. My first visit was made 
in the company of the prime ministers of all the colo- 
nies, who were at Melbourne nominally for a confer- 
ence, but really to enjoy a holiday and the International 
Exhibition. With that extraordinary generosity in the 
spending of other people's money which distinguishes 
colonial cabinets, the Victorian government placed 
special trains, horses, carriages, and hotels at our dis- 
posal, the result of which was that, feted everywhere, 
we saw nothing, and I had to return to Ballarat in order 
even to go through the mines. 

In visiting Lake Learmouth and Clunes, and the 
mining district on each side of Ballarat, I found my- 
self able to discover the date of settlement by the 
names of places, as one finds the age of a London 
suburb by the titles of its terraces. The dates run in 
a wave across the country. St. Arnaud is a town be- 
tween Ballarat and Castlemaine, and Alma lies near 
to it, while Balaklava Hill is near Ballarat, where also 
are Raglan and Sebastopol. Inkerman lies close to 
Castlemaine, and Mount Cathcart bears the name of 
the general killed at the Two Gun battery, while the 
Malakhoff diggings, discovered doubtless toward the 
end of the war, lie to the northward, in the Wimmera. 

Everywhere I found the interior far hotter than the 
coast, but free from the sudden changes of tempera- 
ture that occur in Melbourne twice or thrice a week 
throughout the summer, and are dangerous to children 
and to persons of weak health. After two or three 
days of the hot wind, then comes a night, breathless. 



heavy, still. In the morning the sun rises, once more 
fierce and red. After such a night and dawn, I have 
seen the shade thermometer in the cool verandas of 
the Melbourne Club standing at 95° before ten o'clock, 
when suddenly the sun and sky would change from 
red and brown to gold and bkie, and a merry breeze, 
dancing up from the ice-packs of the South Pole and 
across the Antarctic seas, would lower the temperature 
in an hour to 60° or 65°, After a few days of cold 
and rain, a quiet English morning would be ciit in 
half about eleven by a sudden slamming of doors and 
whirling of dust from the north across the town, while 
darkness came upon the streets. Then was heard the 
cry of "Shut the windows; here's a hot wind," and 
down would go every window, barred and bolted, 
while the oldest colonists walked out to enjoy the dry 
air and healthy heat. The thick walls of the clubs and 
private houses will keep out the heat for about three 
days, but if, as sometimes happens, the hot wind lasts 
longer, then the walls are heated through, and the 
nights are hardly to be borne. Up country the settlers 
know nothing of these changes. The regular irregu- 
larity is peculiar to the Melbourne summer. 



CHAPTER X. 

TASMANIA. 

After the parching heat of Australia, a visit to 
Tasmania was a grateful change. Steaming along 
Port Dalrymple and up the Tamar in the soft sunlight 
of an English afternoon, we were able to look upward, 
and enjoy the charming views of wood and river, in- 
stead of having to stand with downcast head, as in the 
blaze of the Victorian sun. 

The beauty of the Tamar is of a quiet kind: its 
scenery like that of the non- Alpine districts of the 
west coast of New Zealand, but softer and more habit- 
able than is that of even the least rude portions of 
these islands. To one fresh from the baked Australian 
plains, there is likeness between any green and humid 
land and the last unparched country that he may have 
seen. Still, New Zealand cannot show fresher cheeks 
nor homes more cosy than those of the Tamar valley. 
Somersetshire cannot surpass the orchards of Tas- 
mania, nor Devon match its flowers. 

The natural resemblance of 3Iaria Van Dieman's 
Land (as Tasman called it after his betrothed) to Eng- 
land seems to have struck the early settlers. In sail- 
ing up the Tamar, we had on one bank the County 
of Dorset, with its villages touchingly named after 
those at home, according to their situations, from its 
Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle, and St. Alban's Head, 
round to Abbotsbury, and, on our right hand, Devon, 
with its Sidmouth, Exeter, and Torquay. 



Hurrying through Launceston — a pretty little town, 
of which the banks and post-olfice are models of simple 
architecture — I passed at once across the island south- 
ward to Hobarton, the capital. The scenery on the 
great convict road is not impressive. The Tasmaniau 
Mountains — detached and rufirsred masses of basaltic 
rock, from four to live thousand feet in height — are 
wanting in grandeur w^hen seen from a distance, with 
a foreground of flat corn-land. It is disheartening, 
too, in an English colony, to see half the houses shut 
up and deserted, and acre upon acre of old wheat-land 
abandoned to mimosa scrub. The people in these 
older portions of the island have worked their lands to 
death, and even guano seems but to galvanize them 
into a momentary life. Since leaving Virginia, I had 
seen no such melancholy sight. 

N^ature is bountiful enough : in the world there is 
not a fairer climate; the gum-trees grow to 350 feet, 
attesting the richness of the soil; and the giant tree- 
ferns are never injured by heat, as in Australia, nor 
by cold, as in New Zealand. All the fruits of Europe 
are in season at the same time, and the Christmas 
dessert at Hobarton often consists of five and twenty 
distinct fresh fruits. Even more than Britain, Tas- 
mania may be said to present on a small area an 
epitome of the globe: mountain and plain, forest and 
rolling prairie land, rivers and grand capes, and the 
noblest harbor in the world, all are contained in a 
country the size of Ireland. It is unhappily not only 
in this sense that Tasmania is the Ireland of the 
South. 

Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount 
Wellington, — the ppurs in the foreground clothed with 
a crimson carpet by a heathlike plant ; the city nestk^d 
under the basaltic (ioUimns of the crags,— even here it 



is difficult to avoid a certain gloom when the eye, 
sweeping over the vast expanse of Storm Bay and 
D'Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers only three great 
ships in a harbor fitted to contain the navies of the 
world. 

The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict 
days at Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, and later 
of the still more frightful massacres of the aboriginal 
inhabitants of the isle, Yan Dieman's Land has never 
been a name of happy omen, and now the island, in 
changing its title, seems not to have escaped from the 
former blight. The poetry of the English village 
names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes before 
the recollection of the circumstances under which the 
harsher native terms came to be supplanted. Fifty 
years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful 
and numerous though degraded native race. At this 
moment, three old women and a lad who dwell on 
Gun-carriage Rock, in Bass's Straits, are all who re- 
main of the aboriginal population of the island. 

We live in an age of mild humanity, we are often 
told, but, whatever the polish of manner and of minds 
in the old country, in outlying portions of the empire 
there is no lack of the old savagery of our race. Bat- 
tues of the natives were conducted by the military in 
Tasmania not more than twenty years ago, and are 
not unknown even now among the Queensland set- 
tlers. Let it not be thought that Englishmen go out 
to murder natives unprovoked ; they have that provo- 
cation for w^hich even the Spaniards in Mexico used to 
wait, which the Brazilians wait for now — the provoca- 
tion of robberies committed in the neighborhood by 
natives unknown. It is not that there is no oflt'ense to 
punish, it is that the punishment is indiscriminate, that 
even when it falls upon the guilty it visits men who 

VOL. II. 8 



know no better. Where one wretched untaught native 
pilfers from a sheep-station, on the Queensland Downs, 
a dozen will be shot hy the settlers, *'as an example," 
and the remainder of the tribe brought back to the 
district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and 
other devils' missionaries have done their work. 

l^othing will persuade the rougher class of Queens- 
land settlers that the "black-fellow" and his "jin" 
are human. They tell you freely that they look upon 
the native Australian as an ingenious kind of monkey, 
and that it is not for us to talk too much of the treat- 
ment of the "jins," or native women, while the " wrens" 
of the Curra'^h exist among ourselves. 'No great dis- 
tance appears to separate us from the days when the 
Spaniards in the West Indies used to brand on the 
face and arms all the natives they could catch, and 
gamble them away for wine. 

Though not more than three or four million acres 
out of seventeen million acres of land in Tasmania 
have as yet been alienated by the crown, the popula- 
tion has increased only by 15,000 in the last ten years. 
Such is the indolence of the settlers, that vast tracts of 
land in the central plain, once fertile under irrigation, 
have been allowed to fall back into a desert state from 
sheer neglect of the dams and conduits. Though iron 
and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever worked, 
and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island 
is licensed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual 
consumption exceeds five gallons a head for every man, 
woman, and child in the population. Tasmania reached 
her maximum of revenue in 1858, and her maximum 
of trade in 1853. 

The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus- 
eating population, who, like all dwellers in climates 
cool but winterless, are content to dream away their 



^ 



GOVERNOR DAVEYS 
PROCLAMATION 



TO THE ABOR I G I N E S 




GOVERNOR DAVEY'S PROCLAMATION.— P. 86. 



lives in drowsiness to which the habits of a hotter but 
less equable clime — Queensland, for example — are 
energy itself. In addition, however, to this natural 
cause of decline, Van Dieman's Land is not yet free 
from all traces of the convict blood, nor from the evil 
effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but a 
few years since the island was one great jail, and in 
1853 there were still 20,000 actual convicts in the 
island. The old free settlers will tell you that the 
deadly shade of slave labor has not blighted Jamaica 
more thoroughly than that of convict labor has Van 
Dieman's Land. 

Seventy miles northwest of Hobarton is a sheet of 
water called Macquarie Harbor, the deeds wrought 
upon the shores of which are not to be forgotten in a 
decade. In 1823, there were 228 prisoners at Mac- 
quarie Harbor, to whom, in the year, 229 Hoggings and 
9925 lashes were ordered, 9100 lashes being actually 
indicted. The cat was, by order of the authorities, 
soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before being 
used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict 
overseer who took a delight in seeing his companions 
punished. A day seldom passed without five or six 
being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at 
his mercy. In a space of five years, during which the 
prisoners at Macquarie Harbor averaged 250 in num- 
ber, there were 835 floggings and 32,723 lashes admin- 
istered. In the same five years, 112 convicts absconded 
from this settlement, of whom 10 were killed and eaten 
by their companions, 75 perished in the bush with or 
without cannibalism, two were captured with portions 
of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital, 
two were shot, 16 were hanged for murder and canni- 
balism, and seven are reported to have made good 
their escape, though this is by no means certain. 



It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop 
in his evidence before a Royal Commission, that when, 
after a meeting at one of the stations, he read out to 
his men the names of thirty-one condemned to death, 
they with one accord fell upon their knees, and solemnly 
thanked God that they were to be delivered from that 
horrible place. Men were known to commit murder 
that they might be sent away for trial, preferring death 
to Macquai ie Harbor. 

The escapes were often made with the deliberate 
expectation of death, the men perfectly knowing that 
they would have to draw lots for which should be 
killed and eaten. J^othing has ever been sworn to in 
the history of the world which, for revolting atrocity, 
can compare with the conduct of the Pierce-Greenhill 
party during their attempted escape. The testimony 
of Pierce is a revelation of the depths of degradation 
to which man x?an descend. The most fearful thought, 
when we hear of these Tasmanian horrors, is that prob- 
ably many of those subjected to them were originally 
guiltless. If only one in a thousand was an innocent 
man, four human beings were consigned each year to 
hell on earth. We think, too, that the age of trans- 
portation for mere political offenses has long gone by, 
yet it is but eleven or twelve years since Mr. Frost re- 
ceived his pardon, after serving for sixteen years amid 
the horrors of Port Arthur. 

Tasmania has never been able to rid herself of the 
convict population in any great degree, for the free 
colonies have always kept a jealous watch upon her 
emigrants. Even at the time of the great gold-rush to 
Victoria, almost every "Tasmanian bolter" and many 
a suspected but innocent man was seized upon his 
landing, and thrown into Pentridge Jail, to toil within 
its twenty-foot walls till death should come to bis re- 



lief. Even now, men of wealth and station in Victoria 
are sometimes discovered to have been "bolters" in the 
digging times, and are at the mercy of their neighbors 
and the police, unless the governor can be wheedled 
into granting pardons for their former deeds. A 
wealthy Victorian was arrested as a ^'Tasmanian 
bolter" while I was in the colony. 

The passport system is still in force in the free colo- 
nies with regard to passengers arriving from penal 
settlements, and there is a penalty of XlOO inflicted 
upon captains of ships bringing convicts into Mel- 
bourne. The conditional pardons granted to prisoners 
in West Australia and in Tasmania generally contain 
words permitting the convict to visit an}^ portion of the 
world except the British Isles, but the clause is a mere 
dead letter, for none of our free colonies will receive 
even our pardoned convicts. 

It is hard to quarrel with the course the colonies 
have taken in this matter, for to them the transporta- 
tion system appears in the light of moral vitriol- throw- 
ing; still, there is a wide distinction to be drawn be- 
tween the a<ition of the Kew South Welsh and that of 
the New Yorkers, when they declared to a British 
government of the last century, that nothing should 
induce them to accept the labor of ''white English 
slaves:" the Sydney people have enjoyed the advant- 
ages of the system they now blame. Even the Vic- 
torians and South Australians, who have never had 
convicts in their land, can be met by argument. The 
Australian colonies, it might be urged, were planted 
for the sole purpose of affording a suitable soil for the 
reception of British criminals : in face of this fact, 
the remonstrances of the free colonists read somewhat 
oddly, for it would seem as though men who quitted, 
with open eyes, Great Britain to make their home in 

8* 



oftener of the Dart, and unites the beauties of both 
streams. The scenery is exquisitely set in a frame- 
work of hops ; for not only are all the flats covered 
with luxuriant bines, but the hills between which you 
survey the views have also each its "garden," the 
bines being trained upon a wire trellis. 

A lovely ride was that from 'New Norfolk to the 
Panshanger salmon-ponds, where the acclimatization 
of the English fish has lately been attempted. The 
track, now cut along the river cliff, now lost in the 
mimosa scrub, offers a succession of prospects, each 
more lovely than the one before it; and that from the 
ponds themselves is a repetition of the view along the 
vale of the Tow;)^, from Steele's house near Caer- 
marthen. Trout of a foot long, and salmon of an inch, 
rewarded us (in the spirit) for our ride, but we were 
called on to express our belief in the statement, that 
salmon " returned from the sea" have lately been seen 

in the river. Father , the Catholic parish priest, 

"that saw 'em," is the hero of the day, and his past 
experiences upon the Shannon are quoted as testi- 
monies to his infallibility in fish questions. My hosts 
of New Norfolk had their fears lest the reverend gen- 
tleman should be lynched, if it were finally proved 
that he had been mistaken. 

The salmon madness will at least have two results : 
the catalogue of indigenous birds will be reduced to a 
blank sheet, for every wretched Tasmanian bird that 
never saw a salmon egg in all its life is shot down and 
nailed to a post for fear it should eat the ova; and the 
British w^asp will be acclimatized in the southern 
hemisphere. One is known to have arrived in the 
last box of ova, and to have survived with apparent 
cheerfulness his one hundred days in ice. Ilappy fel- 
low, to cross the line in so cool a fashion ! 



The chief drawbacks to Tasmanian picnics and ex- 
cursions are the snakes, which are as numerous 
throughout the island as they are round Sydney. One 
of the convicts in a letter home once wrote: *' Parrots 
is as thick as crows, and snakes is very bad, fourteen 
to sixteen feet long;" but in sober truth the snakes 
are chiefly small. 

The wonderful "snake stories" that in the colonial 
papers take the place of the English "triple birth" 
and "gigantic gooseberry" are all written in vacation 
time by the students at Melbourne University, but a 
true one that I heard in Ilobarton is too good to be 
lost. The chief justice of the island, who, in his leisure 
time, is an amateur naturalist, and collects specimens 
for European collections in his walks, told me that it 
was his practice, after killing a snake, to carry it into 
Hobarton tied to a stick by a double lashing. A few 
days before my visit, on entering his hall, where an 
hour before he had hung^ his stick with a rare snake 
in readiness for the government naturalist, he found 
to his horror that the viper had been only scotched, 
and that he had made use of his regained life to free 
himself from the string which conlined his head and 
neck. He was still tied by the tail, so he was swing- 
ing to and fro, or " squirming around," as some Amer- 
icans would say, with open mouth and protruded 
tongue. When lassoing with a piece of twine Lad 
been tried in vain, my friend fetched a gun, and suc- 
ceeded in killing the snake and much damaging the 
stone-work of his vestibule. 

After a week's sojourn in the neighborhood of 
Hobarton I again crossed the island, but this time by 
a night of piercing moonlight such as can be witnessed 
only in the dry air of the far south. High in the heav- 
ens, and opposite the moon, was the solemn consteb 



lation of the Southern Cross, sharply relieved upon 
the pitchy background of the MageUanic clouds, while 
the weird-tinted stars which vary the night-sky of the 
southern hemisphere stood out from the blue firma- 
ment elsewhere. The next day I was again in Mel- 
bourne. 



CHAPTER XL 



CONFEDERATION. 



Melbourne is unusually gay, for at a shapely palace 
in the center of the city the second great Intercolonial 
Exhibition is being held, and, as its last days are draw- 
ing to their close, fifty thousand people — a great num- 
ber for the colonies — visit the building every week. 
There are exhibitors from each of our seven southern 
colonies, and from French New Caledonia, Nether- 
landish India, and the Mauritius. It is strange to 
remember now that in the colonization both of New 
Zealand and of Australia, we were the successful rivals 
of the French only after having been behind them in 
awakening to the advisability of an occupation of these 
countries. In the case of New Zealand, the French 
fieet was anticipated three several times by the fore- 
thought and decision of our naval officers on the sta- 
tion ; and in the case of Australia, the whole south 
coast was actually named *' La Terre Napoleon," and 
surveyed for colonization by Captain Baudin in 1800. 
New Caledonia, on the other hand, was named and 
occupied by ourselves, and afterward abandoned to 
the French. 



The present remarkable exhibition of the products 
of the Australias, coming just at the time when the 
border customs between Victoria and New South Wales 
have been abolished by agreement, and when all seems 
to point to the formation of a customs union between 
the colonies, leads men to look still further forward, 
and to expect confederation. It is worthy of notice at 
this conjuncture that the Australian Protectionists, as 
a rule, refuse to be protected against their immediate 
neighbors, just as those of America protect the manu- 
factures of the Union rather than of single States. 
They tell us that they can point, with regard to Eu- 
rope, to pauper labor, but that they have no case as 
against the sister colonies; they wish, the}^ say, to 
obtain a wide market for the sale of the produce of 
each colony; the nationality they would create is to be 
Australian, not provincial. 

Already there is postal union, and a partial customs 
union, and confederation itself, however distant in 
fact, has been very lately brought about in the spirit 
by the efforts of the London press, one well-known 
paper having three times in a single article called the 
governor of 'New South Wales by the sounding title 
of " Governor-General of the Australasian colonies," 
to which he has, of course, not the faintest claim. 

There are many difficulties in the way of confedera- 
tion. The leading merchants and squatters of Vic- 
toria are in favor of it ; but not so those of the poorer 
or less populous colonies, where there is much fear of 
being swamped. Th6 costliness of the federal govern- 
ment of New Zealand is a warning against over-hasty 
confederation. Victoria, too, would probably insist 
upon the exclusion of West Australia, on account of 
her convict population. The continental theory is un- 
dreamt of by Australians, owing to their having always 



been inhabitants of comparatively small States, and 
not, like dwellers in the organized territories of Amer- 
ica, potentially citizens of a vast and homogeneous 
empire. 

The choice of capital will, here as in Canada, be a 
matter of peculiar difficulty. It is to be hoped by all 
lovers of freedom that some hitherto unknown village 
will be selected. There is in all great cities a strong 
tendency to Imperialism. Bad pavement, much noise, 
narrow lanes, blockaded streets, all these things are ill 
dealt with by free government, we are told. English- 
men who have been in Paris, Americans who know St. 
Petersburg, forgetting that without the Emperor the 
Prefet is impossible, cry out that London, that New 
York, in their turn need a Haussman. In this tend- 
ency lies a terrible danger to free States — a danger 
avoided, however, or greatly lessened, by the seat of 
the legislature being placed, as in Canada and the 
United States, far away from the great cities. Were 
Melbourne to become the seat of government, nothing 
could prevent the distant colonies from increasing the 
already gigantic power of that city by choosing her 
merchants as their representatives. 

The bearing of confederation upon Imperial interests 
is a more simple matter. Although union will tend 
to the earlier independence of the colonies, yet, if 
federated, they are more likely to be a valuable ally 
than they could be if remaining so many separate 
countries. They would also be a stronger enemy ; but 
distance will make all their wars naval, and a strong 
fleet would be more valuable to us as a friend than 
dangerous as an enemy, unless in the case of a coalition 
against us, in w^hich it w^ould probably not be the 
interest of Australia to join. 

From the colonial point of view, federation would 



tend to secure to the Australians better general and 
local government than they possess at present. It is 
absurd to expect that colonial governors should be 
upon good terms with their charges when we shift 
men every four years — say from Demerara to ^N^ew 
South Wales, or from Jamaica to Victoria. The un- 
happy governor loses half a year in moving to his 
post, and a couple of years in coming to understand 
the circumstances of his new province, and then set- 
tles down to be successful in the ruling of educated 
whites under democratic institutions only if he can 
entirely throw aside the whole of his experience, de- 
rived as it will probably have been from the despotic 
sway over blacks. We never can have a set of colonial 
governors lit for Australia until the Australian gov- 
ernments are made a separate service, and entirely 
separated from the West Indies, Africa, and Hong 
Kong. 

Besides improving the government, confederation 
would lend to every colonist the dignity derived from 
citizenship of a great country — a point the importance 
of which will not be contested by any one who has 
been in America since the war. 

It is not easy to resist the conclusion that confedera- 
tion is in every way desirable. If it leads to independ- 
ence, we must say to the Australians what Houmai 
ta Whiti said in his great speech to the progenitors of 
the Maori race when they were quitting Hawaiki: 
"Depart, and dwell in peace; let there be no quarrel- 
ing among you, but build up a great people." 



YOL. n. 



CHAPTER XII. 

ADELAIDE. 

The capital of South Australia is reputed the hottest 
of all the cities that are chiefly inhabited by the Eng- 
lish race, and as I neared it through the Backstairs 
Pafisnge into the Gulf of St. Vincent, past Kangaroo 
Island, and still more upon landing at Glenelg, I came 
to the conclusion that its reputation was deserved. 
The extreme heat which characterizes South Australia" 
is to some extent a consequence of its lying as far north 
as New South Wales and Queensland, and so far in- 
land as to escape the breeze by which their coasts are 
visited ; for although by " South Australia" we should, 
in the southern hemisphere, naturally understand that 
portion of Australia which was farthest from the 
tropics, yet it is a curious fact that the whole colony 
of Victoria lies to the south of Adelaide, that neither 
of the great southern peninsulas of Australia are in, 
but that nearly all the northernmost points of the con- 
tinent now lie within, the country misnamed '* South 
Australia." 

The immense northern territory, being supposed to 
be valueless, has generously been made a present of 
to South Australia, which thus becomes the largest 
British colony, and nearly as large as British Ilin- 
dostan. If the great expenditure which is going on 
succeeds in causing the discovery of any good land at 
the north, it will of course at once be made into a 
separate colony. The only important result that seems 



likely to follow from this annexation to South Aus- 
tralia of the northern territory is that school-boys' 
geography will suffer; indeed, I should say that a total 
destruction of all principle in the next generation 
would be the inevitable result of so rude a blow to 
confidence in books and masters as the assurance from 
a teacher's lips that the two most remote countries of 
Australia from each other are united under one colonial 
government, and that the northernmost points of the 
whole continent are situated in South Australia. Boys 
will probably conclude that across the line south be- 
comes north and north south, and that in Australia 
the sun rises in the west. 

Instead of gold, wheat, sheep, as in Victoria, the 
staples here are wheat, sheep, copper, and my intro- 
duction to South Australia was characteristic of the 
colony, for I found in Port Adelaide, where I first set 
foot, not only every store filled to overflowing, but 
piles of wheat-sacks in the roadways, and lines of wheat- 
cars on the sidings of railways, without even a tar- 
paulin to cover the grain. 

Of all the mysteries of commerce, those that concern 
the wheat and flour trade are, perhaps, the strangest 
to the uninitiated. Breadstuffs are still sent from Cali- 
fornia and Chili to Victoria, yet from Adelaide, close 
at hand, wheat is being sent to England and flour to 
New York ! 

There can be no doubt that ultimately Victoria and 
Tasmauia will at least succeed in feeding themselves. 
It is probable that neither New Zealand nor Queens- 
land will find it to their interest to do the like. Wool- 
growing in the former and cotton and wool in the lat- 
ter will continue to pay better than wheat in the greater 
portion of their lands. Their granary, and that possi- 
bly of the City of Sydney itself, will be found in South 



Australia, especially if land capable of carrying wheat 
be discovered to the westward of the settlements about 
Adelaide. That the Australias, Chili, California, 
Oregon, and other Pacific States can ever export 
largely of wheat to Europe is now more than doubtful. 
If manufactures spring up on this side the world, these 
countries, whatever their fertility, will have at least 
enough to do to feed themselves. 

As I entered the streets of the " farinaceous village," 
as Adelaide is called by conceited Victorians, I was 
struck with the amount of character they exhibit both 
in the way of buildings, of faces, and of dress. The 
South Australians have far more idea of adapting their 
houses and clothes to their climate than have the peo- 
ple of the other colonies, and their faces adapt them- 
selves. The verandas to the shops are sufficiently con- 
tiguous to form a perfect piazza; the people rise early, 
and water the sidewalk in front of their houses; and 
you never meet a man who does not make some sacri- 
fice to the heat, in the shape of puggree, silk coat, or 
sun-helmet; but the women are nearly as unwise here 
as in the other colonies, and persist in going about in 
shawls and colored dresses. Might they but see a few 
of the Eichmond or Baltimore ladies in their pure white 
muslin frocks, and die of envy, for the dress most con- 
venient in a hot dry climate is also the most beautifal 
under its bright sun. 

The German element is strong in South Australia, 
and there are whole villages in the wheat-country where 
English is never spoken ; for here, as in America, there 
has been no mingling of the races, and the whole diverg- 
ence from the British types is traceable to climatic 
influences, and especially dry heat. The men born 
here are thin, and fine-featured, somewhat like the 
Pitcairn Islanders, while the women are all ahke — 



small, pretty, and bright, but with a bnrnt-up look. 
The haggard eye might, perhaps, be ascribed to the 
dreaded presence of my old friend of the Rocky 
Mountains, the brulot sand-fly. 

The inhabitants of all hot dry countries speak from 
the head, and not the chest, and the English in Aus- 
tralia are acquiring this habit; you seldom find a 
" cornstalk" who speaks well from the chest. 

The air is crisp and hot — crisper and hotter even 
than that of Melbourne. The shaded thermometer 
upon the Victorian coast seldom reaches 110°, but in 
the town of Adelaide 117° has been recorded by the 
government astronomer. Such is the figure of the 
Australian continent that Adelaide, although a sea- 
port town, lies far up as it were inland. Catching the 
heated gales from three of the cardinal points, Ade- 
laide has a summer six months long, and is exposed 
to a fearful continuance of hot winds ; nevertheless, 
105° at Adelaide is easier borne than 95° in the shade 
at Sydney. 

Nothing can be prettier than the outskirts of the 
capital. In laying out Adelaide, its founders have 
reserved a park about a quarter of a mile in width 
all round the city. This gives a charming drive nine 
miles long, outside which again are the olive-yards 
and villas of the citizens. Hedges of the yellow cactus, 
or of the graceful Kangaroo Island acacia, bound the 
gardens, and the pomegranate, magnolia, fig, and aloe 
grow upon every lawn. Five miles to the eastward 
are the cool wooded hills of the Mount Lofty Range, 
on the tops of which are grown the English fruits for 
which the plains aftbrd no shade or moisture. 

Crossing the Adelaide plains, for fifty miles by rail- 
way, to Kapunda, I beheld one great wheat-field with- 
out a break. The country was finer than any stretch 

9* 



of equal extent in California or Victoria, and looked as 
though the crops were " standing" — which in one sense 
they were, though the grain was long since "in." The 
fact is that they use the Ridley machines, by which the 
ears are thrashed out without any cutting of the straw, 
which continues to stand, and w^hich is finally plowed 
in at the farmer's leisure, except in the neighborhood 
of Adelaide. There would be a golden age of par- 
tridge-shooting in Old England did the climate and 
the price of straw allow of the adoption of the Ividley 
reaper. Under this S3^stem, South Australia grows on 
the average six times as much wheat as she can use, 
whereas, if reaping had to be paid for, she could only 
grow from one and a half to twice as much as would 
meet the home demand. 

In this country, as in America, "bad farming" is 
found to pay, for with cheap land, the Ridley reaper, 
and good markets, light crops without labor, save the 
peasant-proprietor's own toil, pay well when heavy 
crops obtained by the use of hired labor w^ould not re- 
imburse the capitalist. The amount of land under 
cultivation has been trebled in the last seven years, 
and half a million acres are now under wheat. South 
Australia has this year produced seven times as much 
grain as she can consume, and twelve acres are under 
wheat for every adult male of the population of the 
colony. 

A committee has been lately sitting in New South 
Wales "to consider the state of the colony." To 
judge from the evidence taken before it, the members 
seemed to have conceived that their task was to in- 
quire why South Australia prospered above J^ew South 
Wales. Frugality of the people, especially of the 
Germans, and fertility of the soil were the reasons 
-vhich they gave for the result, but it is impossible not 



instance of the triumph of small proprietors, of whom, 
there are now some seven or eisrht thousand in the 
colony, and these were brought here by the adoption 
of the Wakefield land system. 

In the early days of the colony, land was sold at a 
good price in 130-acre sections, with one acre of town- 
land to each agricultural section. ]^ow, under rules 
made at home, but confirmed after the introduction 
of self-government, laud is sold by auction, with a 
reserved price of XI an acre, but when once a block 
has passed the hammer, it can forever be taken up at 
£1 the acre without further competition. The Land 
Fund is kept separate from the other revenue, and a 
few permanent charges, such as that for the aborigines, 
being paid out of it, the remainder is divided into 
three portions, of which two are destined for public 
works, and one for immigration. 

There is a marvelous contrast to be drawn between 
the success w^hich has attended the "Wakefield system 
dn South Australia and the total failure, in the neigh- 
boring colony of West Australia, of the old system, 
under which vast tracts of land being alienated for 
small prices to the crown, there remains no fund for 
introducing that abundant supply of labor without 
which the land is useless. 

Adelaide is so distant from Europe that no immi- 
grants come of themselves, and, in the assisted import- 
ation of both men and women, the relative proportions 
of English, Scotch, and Irish that exist at home are 
carefully preserved, by which simple precaution the 
colony is saved from an organic change of type, such 
as that which threatens all America, although it would, 
of course, be idle to deny that the restriction is aimed 
ao^ainst the Irish. 



The greatest difficulty of young countries lies in 
the want of women : not only is this a bar to the 
natural increase of population ; it is a delicieucy pre- 
ventive of permanency, destructive of religion ; where 
woman is not there can be no home, no country. 

How to obtain a supply of marriageable girls is a 
question which Canada, Tasmania, South Australia, 
New South Wales, have each in their turn attempted 
to solve by the artiticial introduction of Irish work- 
house girls. The difficulty apparently- got rid of, we 
begin to find that it is not so much as fairly seen; we 
have yet to look it squarely in the face. The point of 
the matter is that we should find not girls, but honest 
girls, — not women merely, but women fit to bear fam- 
ilies in a free State. 

One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a 
lately-received batch of Irish work-house girls, has said 
that, if these are the " well-conducted girls, he should 
be anxious to see a few of the evil-disposed." While 
in South Australia, I read the details of the landing 
of a similar party of women from Limerick work- 
house one Sunday afternoon at Point Levi, the Lam- 
beth of Quebec. Although supplied by the city au- 
thorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave 
for Montreal at early morning, nothing could be more 
abominable than their conduct in the mean while. 
They sold baggage, bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarfs, 
keeping on nothing but their crinolines and senseless 
finery. With the pence they thus collected they bought 
corn-whisky, and in a few hours were yelling, fighting, 
swearing, wallowing in beastly drunkenness; and by 
the time the authorities caaie down to pack them off 
by train, they were as fiends, mad with rum and wisky. 
At five in the morning, they reached the Catholic 
Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were shocked 



and horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd 
speech ; nothing should force them, they declared, ever 
again to take into their peaceable asylum the Irish 
work-house girls. This was no exceptional case: the 
reports from South Australia, from Tasmania, can 
show as bad ; and in Canada such conduct on the part 
of the freshly-landed girls is common. A Tasmanian 
mac^istrate has stated in evidence before a Parliament- 
ar}^ Committee that once when his wife was in ill health 
he went to one of the immigration offices, and applied 
for a decent woman to attend on a sick lady. The 
woman was duly sent down, and found next day in 
her room lying on the bed in a state best pictured in 
her own words: "Here I am with my yard of clay, 
blowing a cloud, you 8ay'' 

It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls 
cost a colony from first to last, in the way of prisons, 
hospitals, and public morals, ten times as much as the 
free passages across the seas of an equal number of 
worthy Irish women, free from the work-house taint. 
Of one of these gangs which landed in Quebec not 
many years ago, it has been asserted by the immigra- 
tion superintendents that the traces are visible to this 
day, for wherever the women went, "sin, and shame, 
and death were in their track." The Irish unions have 
no desire in the matter beyond that of getting rid of 
their most abandoned girls; their interests and those 
of the colonies they supply are diametrically opposed. 
No inspection, no agreements, no supervision can be 
effective in the face of facts like these. The class that 
the unions can afford to send, Canada and Tasmania 
cannot afford to keep. Women are sent out with 
babies in their arms ; no one will take them into ser- 
vice because the children are in the way, and in a few 
weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonial 



benevolent societies, to bo kept till the ebildron grow 
up m* the niotliers die. Even when the girls are not 
so wholly vieious as to he useless in service, they are 
utterly ignorant of everything they ought to know. Of 
neither domestic nor tarni-work have thev a prain of 
knowledge. Of thirteen who were lately sent to an 
up-conntry town, but one knew how to cook, or wash, 
or milk, or iron, while three of them had agreed to 
refuse eniplovment unless thev were eno-aiired to serve 
toirether. The aijents are at their wits' ends; either 
the girls are so notoriously infamous in their ways of 
life that no one will hire them, or else they are so ex- 
travagant in their new-found ''independence** that they 
on their side will not bo hired. Meanwhile the Irish 
authorities lay every evil upon the long sea vo^nige. 
They sav that they select the best of girls, but a few 
days at sea sutHce to demoralize them. 

The colonies could not do better than combine for 
the establishment of a new and more efficient emigra- 
tion airencv in Ireland. To avoid the evil, bv as far 
as possible refusing to meet it face to face at all, South 
Australia has put restrictions on her Irish immigration; 
for here as in America it is found that the Scotch and 
Germans are the best of immigrants. Th43 Scotch are 
not more successful in Adelaide than everywhere in 
the known world. Half the most prominent among 
the statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Vic- 
toria, and of Queensland, are born Scots, and all the 
grea^i merchants of India are of the same nation. 
Whether it be that the Scotch emii^rants are for the 
most part men of better education tlian those of other 
nations, of whose citizens only the poorest and most 
ignorant are known to emigrate, or whether the Scotch- 
nu\n owes his uniform success in every climate to his 
perseverance or his shrewdness, the fact remains, that 



wherever abroad you come across a Scotchman, you 
\nvnri'd])\y find him proHperoiiB and reBpected. 

The Scotch eniii^rant is a man wlio leavcB Scotland 
bocauHC he wishes to rise faster and liigher tPian he 
can at home, wherean the emigrant Irishman quits 
<jlalway or County Cork only because there is no longer 
food or shelter for him there. The Scotchman crosses 
the seas in calculating contentment; tlie Irishman in 
Borrow and despair. 

At the Bui'ra ]>urra and Kapunda copper-mines 
there is not mu(;h to see, so my last days in South 
Australia were given to tlie politics of the colony, 
which present one singular leature. For the elections 
to the Council or Upper House, for which the fran- 
chise is a freehold worth X/>0 or a leasehold of X20 a 
year, the \vh(jle country forms but a single district, and 
the majority elect their men. hi a country where 
party feeling runs high, such a system, were it possi- 
ble, would evidently unite almost all the evils conceiv- 
able in a j)lan of representation, but in a peaceful 
colony it undoubtedly works well. Having absolute 
power in their hands, the majority here, as in the selec- 
tion of a governor for an American State, use their 
position with great prudence, and make choice of the 
best men that the country can produce. The franchise 
for the Lower House, for the elections to which the 
colony is " districted," is the simple one of six months' 
residence, which with the ballot works irreproachably. 

The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon 
which Captain Cadell, the opener of the Murray to 
trade, sailed with his naval expedition to fix upon a 
capital for the Northern territory ; that coast of tropi- 
cal Australia which faces the Moluccas. As Governor 
Gilpin had pressed me to stay, he pressed me to go 
with him, making as an inducement a promise to name 



after me either "a city" or a headland. lie said be 
should advise me to select the headland, because that 
would remain, whereas the city probably would not. 
AVheu I pleaded that he had no authority to carry pas- 
sengers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto 
the expeditions have discovered nothing but natives, 
mangroves, alligators, and sea-slugs, and the whole of 
the money received from capitalists at home, for 
300,000 acres of land to be surveyed and handed over 
to them in North Australia, being now exhausted, the 
government are seriously thinking of reimbursing the 
investors and giving up the search for land. It would 
be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa from Adelaide, 
as tropical Australia. If the N^orthern territory is ever 
to be rendered habitable, it must be by Queensland 
that the work is done. 

It is not certain that North Australia may not be 
found to yield gold in plenty. In a little known manu- 
script of the seventeenth century, the northwest of 
Australia is called "The land of gold;" and we are 
told that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land 
of gold by stress of weather, picked up in a few hours 
their boat full of gold nuggets, and returned in safety. 
They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of 
their dread of the unknown seas; but Manoel Godinho 
de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese Lord 
Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich 
the crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures 
it contained. It would be strange enough if gold 
came to be discovered on the northwest coast, in 
the spot from which the Portuguese reported their 
discovery. 

By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian 
nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George's Sound. 
A long narrow belt Pf a clear red-yellow light lay 



glowing along the horizon to the east, portending 
heat and drought; elsewhere the skies Avcre of a deep 
blue-black. As we steamed past Kangaroo Island, 
and through Investigator Straits, the sun shot up 
from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the 
northern desert, rising on a t^aaen ati^^.i' che stillness 
of the night, whirled clouds of saud over the surface 
of the bay. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



TRANSPORTATION. 



After five days* steady steaming across the great 
Australian bight, north of which lies the true "Terra 
Australia incognita," I reached King George's Sound — 
"Le Port du lioi Georges en Australie," as I saw it 
written on a letter in the jail. At the shore end of 
a great land-locked harbor, the little houses of bright 
white stone that make up the town of Albany peep 
out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate, 
unlike that of the greater portion of Australia is damp 
and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flower- 
ing bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and 
curiously-cut leaves. 

The contrast between the scenery and the people 
of West Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal 
inhabitants of Albany were represented by a tribe of 
filthy natives — tall, half starved, their heads bedaubed 
with red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow 
clay; the "colonists" by a gang of fiend-faced con- 

VOL. II. 10 



victs working in chains upon the esphmade, and a 
group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with 
bull-dogs on the pier, while the native women, half 
clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching 
past with an aspect of detiant wretchedness. Work iis 
never done in West Australia unless under the com- 
pulsion of the lash, for a similar degradation of labor 
is produced by the use of convicts as by that of slaves. 

Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia, 
West Australia, then called Swan River, although one 
of the oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by 
the free gift to the iirst settlers of vast territories use- 
leas without labor, that in 1849 she petitioned to be 
made a penal settlement, and though at the instance 
of Victoria transportation to the Australias has now 
all but ceased, Freemantle Prison is still the most con- 
siderable convict establishment we possess across the 
seas. 

At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts 
or emancipists within the " colony," of whom 1500 
were in prison, 1500 in private service on tickets-of- 
leave, while 1500 had served out their time, and over 
5000 had been released upon conditional pardons : 600 
of the convicts had arrived from England in 1865. 
Out of a total population, free and convict, of 20,000, 
the offenders in the year had numbered nearly 3500, 
or more than one-sixth of the people, counting women 
and children. 

If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done 
but little for the settlement, they have at least enabled 
us to draw the moral, that transportation and free 
emigration cannot exist side by side: the one element 
must overbear and destroy the other. In Western 
Australia, the convicts and their keepers form two- 
thirds of the whole population, and the district is a 



great English prison, not a colony, and exports but a 
little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cotton. 

Western Australia is as unpopular with the convicts 
as with free settlers : fifty or sixty convicts have suc- 
cessfully escaped from the settlement within the last 
few years. From twenty to thirty escapes take place 
annually, but the men are usually recaptured within a 
mouth or two, although sheltered by the people, the 
vast majority of w^hom are ticket-of-leave men or ex- 
convicts. Absconders receive a hundred lashes and 
one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to seventy 
unsuccessful attempts at escape are reported every 
year. 

On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a 
man at work in ponderous irons. The sun was strik- 
ing down on him in a way that none can fancy wlio 
have no experience of Western Australia or Bengal, 
and his labor was of the heaviest; now he had to prise 
up huge rocks with a crow-bar, now to handle pick and 
shovel, now to use the rammer, under the eye of an 
armed warder, who idled in the shade by the road- 
side. This was an "escape man," thus treated with a 
view to cause him to cease his continual endeavors to 
get away from Albany. E"o wonder that the " chain- 
gang" S3'Stem is a failure, and the number both of 
attempts and actual escapes heavier under it than 
before the introduction of this tremendous punish- 
ment. 

Many of the " escapes " are made with no other view 
than to obtain a momentary change of scene. On the 
last return trip of the ship in which I sailed from Ade- 
laide to King George's Sound, a convict coal-man was 
found built up in the coal-heap on deck : he and his 
mates at Albany had drawn lots to settle which of 
them should be thus packed off by the help of the 



others "for a change." Of ultimate escape there could 
be no chance ; the coal on deck could not fall to be 
exhausted within a day or two after leaving port, and 
this they knew. When he emerged, black, half 
smothered, and nearly starved, from his hiding-place, 
he allowed himself to be quietly ironed, and so kept 
till the ship reached Adelaide, when he was given up 
to the authorities, and sent back to Albany for punish- 
ment. Acts of this class are common enousrh to have 
received a name. The offenders are called "bolters 
for a change." 

A convict has been known when marching in his 
gang suddenly to lift up his spade, and split the skull 
of the man who walked in front of him, thus courting 
a certain death for no reason but to escape from the 
monotony of toil. Another has doubled his punish- 
ment for fun by calling out to the magistrates, "Gentle- 
men, pray remember that I am entitled to an iron-gang, 
because this is the second time of my absconding." 

One of the strangest things about the advance of 
Enfrhmd is the manv-sided character of the form of 
early settlement: Central ^N^orth America we plant 
with Mormons, N^ew Zealand wntli the runaways of 
our whaling ships, Tasmania and portions of Australia 
with our transported felons. Transportation has gone 
through many phases since the system took its rise in 
the exile to the colonies under Charles II. of the moss- 
troopers of lN"orthumberland. The plan of forcing the 
exiles to labor as slaves on the plantations was intro- 
duced in the reign of George II., and by an Act then 
passed offenders were actually put up to auction, and 
knocked down to men who undertook to transport 
them, and make what they could of their labor. In 
1786, an Order in Council named the eastern coast of 
Australia and the adjacent islands as the spot to which 



transportation beyond the seas should be directed, and 
in 1787 the black bar was drawn indelibly across the 
page of history which records the foundation of the 
colony of New South Wales. From that time to the 
present day the world has witnessed the portentous 
sight of great countries in which the major portion of 
the people, the whole of the handicraftsmen, were con- 
victed felons. 

There being no free people whatever in the " col- 
onies" when first formed, the governors had no choice 
but to appoint convicts to all the ofiicial situations. 
The consequence was robbery and corruption. Re- 
corded sentences were altered by the convict-clerks, 
free pardons and grants of land were sold for money. 
The convict overseers forced their gangmen to labor 
not for government, but for themselves, securing 
secrecy by the unlimited supply of rum to the men, 
who in turn bought native women with all that they 
could spare. On the sheep-stations whole herds were 
stolen, and those from neighboring lands driven in to 
show on muster-days. Enormous fortunes were accumu- 
lated by some of the emancipists, by fraud and infamy 
rather than b}^ prudence, we are told, and a vast num- 
ber of convicts were soon at large in Sydney town 
itself, without the knowledge of the police. As the 
settlements grew in years and size, the sons of convict 
parents grew up in total ignorance, while such few 
free settlers as arrived — "the ancients," as they were 
styled, or "the ancient nobility of Botany Bay" — were 
wholly dependent on convict tutors for the education 
of their children — the "cornstalks" and "currency 
girls ;" and cock-fighting was the chief amusement of 
both sexes. The newspapers were without exception 
conducted by gentleman convicts, or " specials," as 
they were called, who were assigned to the editors for 

10* 



that purpose, and the police force itself was composed 
of ticket-of-leave men and " emancipists." Convicts 
were thus the only schoolmasters, the only governesses, 
the only nurses, the only journalists, and, as there were 
even convict clergy-men and convict university pro- 
fessors, the training of the youth of the land was com- 
mitted almost exclusively to the felon's care. 

A petition sent home from Tasmania in 1848 is sim- 
ple and pathetic; it is from the parents and guardians 
resident in Van Dieman's Land. They set forth that 
there are 13,000 free children growing up in the colony, 
that within six years alone 24, OOP convicts have been 
turned into the island, and of these but 4000 were 
women. The result is that their children are brought 
up in the midst of profligacy and degradation. 

The lowest depth of villainy, if in such universal in- 
famy degrees can be conceived, was to be met with in 
the parties working in the "chain-gangs" on the roads. 
"Assignees" too bad even for the whip of the harsh- 
est, or the "beef and beer" of the most lenient master, 
brutalized still further, if that were possible, by asso- 
ciation with those as vile as themselves, and followed 
about the country by women too infamous even for 
service in the houses of the up-country settlers, or the 
gin-palaces of the towns, worked in gangs upon the 
roads by day, whenever promises of spirits or the hope 
of tobacco could induce them to work at all, and found 
a compensation for such unusual toil in nightly quitting 
their camp, and traversing the country, robbing and 
murdering those they met, and sacking every home- 
stead that lay in their track. 

The clerk in charge of one of the great convict bar- 
racks was himself a convict, and had an understanding 
with the men under his care that they might prowl 
about at night and rob on condition that they should 



share their gaiDS with nim, ana that, it they were lonna 
out, he Bhould himself prosecute them for being absent 
without leave. Juries were composed either of con- 
victs, or of publicans dependent on the convicts for 
their livelihood, and convictions were of necessity 
extremely rare. In a plain case of murder the judge 
was known to say: "If I don't attend to the recom- 
mendation to mercy, these fellows will never find a 
man guilty again," and jurymen would frequently 
hand down notes to the counsel for the defense, and 
bid him give himself no trouble, as they intended to 
acquit their friend. 

The lawyers were mostly convicts, and perjury in 
the courts was rife. It has been given in evidence 
before a Royal Commission by a magistrate of Kew 
South "Wales that a Sydney free immigrant once had 
a tailor's bill sent in which he did not owe, he having 
been but a few weeks in the colony. He instructed a 
lawyer, and did not himself appear in court. He after- 
ward heard that he had won his case, for the tailor had 
sworn to the bill, but the immigrant's lawyer, "to 
save trouble," had called a witness who swore to hav- 
ing paid it, which settled the case. Sometimes there 
were not only convict witnesses and convict jurors, but 
convtct judges. 

The assignment system was supposed to be a great 
improvement upon the jail, but its only certain result 
was that convict master and convict man used to get 
drunk together, while a night never passed without a 
burglary in Sydney. Many of the convicts' mistresses 
went out from England as government free emigrants, 
taking with them funds subscribed by the thieves at 
home and money obtained by the robberies for which 
their '^ fancy men" had been convicted, and on their 
arrival at Sydney succeeded in getting their paramours 



assigned to them as convict servants. Such was the 
disparity of the sexes that the term "wife" was a 
mockery, and the Female Emigration Society and the 
government vied with each other in sending out to 
Sydney the worst women in all London, to reinforce 
the ranks of the convict girls of the Paramatta factory. 
Even among the free settlers, marriage soon became 
extremely rare. Convicts were at the head of the 
colleges and benevolent asylums; the custom-house 
olhcials were all convicts; one of the occupants of the 
office of attorney-general took for his clerk a notorious 
convict, who was actually recommitted to Bathurst 
after his appointment, and yet allowed to return tc- 
Sydney and resume his duties. 

The most remarkable peculiarity of the assignment 
system was its gross uncertainty. Some assigned con- 
victs spent their time working for high wages, living 
and drinking with their masters; others were mere 
slaves. Whether, however, he be in practice well or 
ill treated, in the assignment or apprenticeship system 
the convict is, under whatever name, a slave, subject 
to the caprice of a master who, though he cannot him- 
self ilog his "servant," can have him dogged by writing 
a note or sending his complimeiits to his neighbor the 
magistrate on the next run or farm. The "whipping- 
houses" of Mississippi and Alabama had their parallel 
in ISTew South Wales; a look or word would cause the 
hurrj'ing of the servant to the post or the forge as a 
preliminary to a month in the chain-gang "" on the 
roads," On the other hand, nothing under the assign- 
ment system can prevent skilled convict workmen 
being paid and pampered by their masters, whose in- 
terest it evidently becomes to get out of them all the 
work possible through excessive indulgence, as intel- 
ligent labor cannot be produced through the machinery 



of the whipping-post, but may be through that of " beef 
and beer." 

Whatever may have been the true interest of the 
free settlers, cruelty was in practice commoner than 
indulgence. Fifty and a hundred lashes, months of 
solitary confinement, years of labor in chams upon 
the roads, were laid upon convicts for such petty 
offenses as brawling, drunkenness, and disobedience. 
In 1835, among the 28,000 convicts then in New 
South Wales, there were 22,000 summary convictions 
for disorderly or dishonest conduct, and in a 3'ear the 
average was oOOO floggings, and above 100,000 lashes. 
In Tasmania, where the convicts then numbered 15,000, 
the summary convictions were 15,000 and the lashes 
50,000 a year. 

The criminal returns of Tasmania and. New South 
Wales contain the condemnation of the transportation 
system. In the single year of 1834, one-seventh of 
the free population of Yan Dieman.'s Land were sum- 
marily convicted of drunkenness. In that year, in a 
population of 37,000, 15,000 w^ere convicted before the 
courts for various offenses. Over a hundred persons 
a year were at that time sentenced to death for crimes 
of violence in New South Wales alone. Less than a 
fourth of the convicts served their time without incur- 
ring additional punishment from the police, and those 
who thus escaped proved generally in after life the 
worst of all, and even government officials were forced 
into admitting that transportation demoralized fur 
more persons than it reformed. Hundreds of assigned 
convicts made their escape to the back country, and 
became bushrangers ; many got down to the coast, 
and crossed to the Pacific islands, whence they spread 
the infamies of New South Wales throughout all Poly- 
nesia. A Select Committee of the House of Commons 



reported, in words characteristic of our race, that these 
convicts committed, in New Zealand and the Pacific, 
" outrages at which humanity shudders," and which 
were to be deplored as being "injurious to our com- 
mercial interests in that quarter of the globe." 

Transportation to !N"ew South Wales came to its end 
none too soon : in fifty years, 75,000 convicts had been 
transported to that colony, and 30,000 to the little 
island of Tasmania in twenty years. 

Were there no other argument for the discounte- 
nance of transportation, it would be almost enough 
to say that the life in the convict-ship itself makes 
the reformation of transported criminals impossible. 
Where many bad men are brought together, the few 
not wholly corrupt who may be among them have no 
opportunity for speech, and the grain of good that may 
exist in every heart can have no chance for life; if not 
inclination, pride at least leads the old hand to put 
down all acts that are not vile, all words that are not 
obscene. Those who have sailed in convict company 
say that there is something terrible in the fiendish 
delisrht that the "old hands" take in watching the 
steady degradation of the " new chums." The hard- 
ened criminals invariably meet the less vile with out- 
rage, ridicule, and contempt, and the better men soon 
succumb to rufiians who have crime for their profes- 
sion, and for all their relaxation vice. 

To describe the horrors of the convict-ships, we are 
told, would be impossible. The imagination will scarce 
sufiace to call up dreams so hideous. Four months of 
iilthiness in a floating hell sink even the least bad to 
the level of unteachable brutality. Mutiny is un- 
known; the convicts are their own masters and the 
ship's, but the shrewd callousness of the old jail-bird 
teaches all that there is nothing to be gained even by 



momentary success. Rage and violence are seldom 
seen, but there is a humor that is worse than blows, — 
conversation that transcends all crime in infamy. 

It will be long before the last traces of convict dis- 
ease disappear from Tasmania and 'New South Wales ; 
the gold-find has done much to purify the air, free 
selection may lead to a still more bright advance, 
manufacturing may lend its help ; but years must go 
by before Tasmania can be prosperous or Sydney 
moral. Their history is not only valuable as a guide 
to those who have to save West Australia, as General 
Bourke and Mr. Wentworth saved l!^ew South Wales, 
but as an example, not picked from ancient rolls, but 
from the records of a system founded within the 
memory of living man, and still existent, of what 
transportation must necessarily be, and what it may 
easily become. 

The results of a dispassionate survey of the trans- 
portation system are far from satisfactory. If deporta- 
tion be considered as a punishment, it would be hard 
to find a worse. Punishment should be equable, re- 
formatory, deterrent, cheap. Transportation is the 
most costly of all the punishments that are known to 
us; it is subject to variations that cannot be guarded 
against; it is severest to the least guilty and slightest 
to the most hardened ; it morally destroys those who 
have some good remaining in them; it leaves the ruf- 
fianly malefactor w^orse if possible than it finds him; 
and, while it is frightfully cruel and vindictive in its 
character, it is useless as a deterrent because its nature 
is unknown at home. Transportation to the English 
thief means exile, and nothing more; it is only after 
conviction, when far away from his uncaught asso- 
ciates, that he comes to find it worse than death. In- 
stead of deterring, transportation tempts to crime ; 



instead of reforming, it debases the bad, and confirms 
in villainy the already infamous. To every bad man it 
gives the worst companions ; the infiimous are to be 
reformed by association v^ith the vile ; while its efiects 
upon the colonies are described in every petition of the 
settlers, and testified to by the whole history of our 
plantations in the antipodes, and by the present con- 
dition of West Australia and Tasmania, from which, 
however, I^ew South Wales has happily escaped. We 
have come at last to transportation in its most limited 
and restricted sense; the only remaining step is to be 
quit of it altogether. 

In conjunction with all punishment, we should secure 
some means of separating the men one from another 
as soon as the actual punishment is terminated : to 
settle them on land, to settle them with wives where 
possible, should be our object. The work which really 
has in it something of reformation is that which a man 
has to do, not in order that he may avoid whipping, 
but that he may escape starvation; and it is from this 
point of view that transportation is defensible. A man, 
however bad, will generally become a useful member 
of society and a not altogether neglectful father if 
allowed to settle upon land away from his old asso- 
ciates; but morbid tendencies of every kind are 
strengthened by close association w^ith others who are 
laboring under a like infirmity: and where the former 
convicts are allowed to hang together in towns, nothing 
is to be expected better than that which is actually 
found — namely, a state of society where wives speedily 
become as villainous as their husbands, and where chil- 
dren are brought up to emulate their fathers' crimes. 

To keep the men separate from each other, after the 
expiration of the sentence, we need to send the con- 
victs to a fairly populous country, whence arises this 



great dimculty: it we send convicts to a populous 
colony, we are met at once by a cry that we are forc- 
ing the workmen of the colony into a one-sided com- 
petition ; that we are offering an unbearable insult to 
the free population ; that, in attempting to reform the 
fehm, in ajlowing him to be absorbed into the colonial 
society, we are degrading and corrupting the whole 
community on the chance of possible benefit to our 
English villain. On the other hand, if we send our 
convicts to an uninhabited land, such as E"ew South 
Wales and Tasmania were, such as West Australia is 
now, we build up an artificial Pandemonium, whither 
we convey at the public cost the pick and cream of the 
ruffians of the world, to form a community of which 
each member must be sufficiently vile of himself to 
corrupt a nation. 

If by care the difficulty of which I have spoken can 
be avoided, transportation might be replaced by short 
sentences and solitary confinement, and low diet, to be 
followed by forced exile, under regulations, to some 
selected colony, say the Ghauts of Eastern Africa, op- 
posite to Madagascar, or the highlands that skirt the 
Zambesi River. Exile after punishment may often be 
the only way of providing for convicts who would 
otherwise be forced to return to their former ways. 
The difficulties in the way of discharged convicts seek- 
ing employment are too terrible for them not to ac- 
cept joyfully any simple plan for emigration to a coun- 
try where they are unknown. 

In Western Australia, transportation has not been 
made subservient to colonization, and both in conse- 
quence have failed. 

On going on board the Bombay at King George's 
Spund, I at once found myself in the East. The cap- 
tain's crew of Malays, the native cooks in long white 

VOL. II. 11 



gowns, the Bombay serangs in dark-bine turbans, red 
cummerbunds, and green or yellow trowsers ; the negro 
or Abyssinian stokers, and passengers in coats of 
China-grass; the Hindoo deck-sweepers playing on 
their tomtoms in the intervals of work; the punkahs 
below; the Hindostanee names for every one on deck; 
and, above all, the general indolence of everybody, all 
told of a new world. 

A convict clerk superintended the coaling, which 
took place before we left the harbor for Ceylon, and 
I remarked that the dejection of his countenance ex- 
ceeded that of the felon-laborers who worked in irons 
on the quay. There is a wide-spread belief in England 
that unfair favor is shown to '* gentlemen convicts.'* 
This is simply not the case ; every educated prisoner 
is employed at in-door work, for which he is suited, 
and not at road-making, in which he might be useless; 
but there are few cases in which he would not wish to 
exchange a position full of hopeless degradation for 
that of an out-door laborer, who passes through his 
daily routine drudgery (far from the prison) unknown, 
and perhaps in his fancy all but free. The longing to 
change the mattock for the pen is the result of envy, 
and confined to those who, if listened to, would prove 
incapable of pursuing the pen-driver's occupation. 

Under a fair and freshening breeze, we left the port 
of Albany, happy to escape from a jail the size of In- 
dia, even those of us who had been forced to pass only 
a few days in West Australia. 



CHAPTER XIY. 

AUSTRALIA. 

Pacing the deck with difficulty as the ship tore 
through the lava-covered seas, before a favoring gale 
that caught us off Cape Lewin, some of us discussed 
the prospects of the great south land as a whole. 

In Australia, it is often said, we have a second 
America in its infancy ; but it may be doubted whether 
we have not become so used to trace the march of em- 
pire on a westward course, through Persia and Assy- 
ria, Greece and Rome, then by Germany to England 
and America, that we are too readily prepared 
to accept the probability of its onward course to the 
Pacific. 

The progress of Australia has been singularly rapid. 
In 1830, her population was under 40,000; in 1860, it 
numbered 1,500,000; nevertheless, it is questionable 
how far the progress will continue. The natural con- 
ditions of America in Australia are exactly reversed. 
All the best lands of Australia are on her coast, and 
these are already taken up by settlers. Australia has 
three-quarters the area of Europe, but it is doubtful 
whether she will ever support a dense population 
throughout even half her limits. The uses of the 
northern territory have yet to be discovered, and the 
interior of the continent is far from being tempting 
to the settler. Upon the whole, it seems likely that 
almost all the imperfectly-known regions of Australia 
will in time be occupied by pastoral crown tenants, 



but that the area of agricultural operations is not 
likely to admit of indefinite extension. The central 
district of Australia, to the extent, perhaps, of half 
the entire continent, lies too far north for winter rains, 
too far south for tropical wet seasons, and in these 
vast solitudes agriculture may be pronounced impos- 
sible, sheep-farming difficult. As far as sufficient 
water for sheep and cattle-stations is concerned, there 
will be no difficulty in retaining this in tanks or rais- 
ing it by means of wells, and the wool, tallow, and 
even meat, will be carried by those railways for which 
the country is admirably fitted, while the construc- 
tion of locks upon the Murray and its tributaries will 
enable steamers to carry the whole trade of the 
Riverina. So far, all is well, but the arable lands of 
Australia are limited by the rains, and apparently the 
limit is a sadly narrow one. 

Once in awhile, a heavy winter rain appears to fall 
in the interior; grass springs up, the lagoons are filled, 
the up-country squatters make their fortunes, and all 
goes prosperously for a time. Accounts reach the 
coast cities of the astonishing fertility of the interior, 
and hundreds of settlers set ofi' to the remotest dis- 
tricts. Two or three years of drought then follow, 
and all the more enterprising squatters are soon ruined, 
with a gain, however, sometimes of a few thousand 
square miles of country to civilization. 

Hitherto the Australians have not made so much as 
they should have done of the country that is within 
their reach. The want of railroads is incredible. There 
are but some 400 miles of railway in all Australia — far 
less than the amount possessed by the single infant 
State of Wisconsin. The sums spent upon the Vic- 
torian lines have deterred the colonists from com- 
pleting their railway system: £10,000,000 sterlin:^^ 



were spent upon 200 miles of road, through easy 
country in which the land cost nothing. The United 
States have made nearly 40,000 miles of railroad for 
less than .£300,000,000 sterling; Canada made her 
2000 miles for £20,000,000, or ten times as much rail- 
road as Victoria for only twice the money. Cuha has 
already more miles of railroad than all Australia. 

Small as are the inhabited portions of Australia 
when compared with the corresponding divisions of 
the United States, this country nevertheless to English 
eyes is huge enough. The part of Queensland already 
peopled is live times larger than the United Kingdom. 
South Australia and West Australia are each of them 
nearly as large as British India, but of these colonies 
the greater part is desert. Fertile Victoria, the size of 
Great Britain, is only a thirty-fourth part of Australia. 

In face of the comparatively small amount of good 
agricultural country known to exist in Australia, the 
disproportionate size of the great cities shows out more 
clearly than ever. Even Melbourne, when it comes to 
be examined, has too much the air of a magnified 
Ilobart, of a city with no country at its back, of a 
steam-hammer set up to crack nuts. Queensland is at 
present free from the burden of gigantic cities, but 
then Queensland is in greater danger of becoming 
what is in reality a slave republic. 

Morally and intellectually, at all events, the colonies 
are thriving. A literature is springing up, a national 
character is being grafted upon the good English stock. 
What shape the Australian mind will take is at pres- 
ent somewhat doubtful. In addition to considerable 
shrewdness and purely Saxon capacity and willingness 
to combine for local objects, we find in Australia an 
admirable love of simple mirth, and a serious distaste 

for prolonged labor in one direction, while the down- 

s 11* 



rightness and determination in the pursuit of truth, 
remarkable in America, are less noticeable here. 

The extravagance begotten of the tradition of con- 
vict times has not been without effect, and the settlers 
waste annually, it is computed, food which would 
support in Europe a population of twice their numbers. 

This wastefulness is perhaps, however, in sonie de- 
gree a consequence of the necessary habits of a pas- 
toral people. The 8000 tons of tallow exported annually 
by the Australias are said to represent the boiling 
down of sheep enough to feed half a million of people 
for a twelvemonth. 

Australian manners, like the American, resemble 
the French rather than the British — a resemblance 
traceable, perhaps, to the essential democracy of Aus- 
tralia, America, and France. One surface point which' 
catches the eye in any Australian ball-room, or on any 
race-course, is clearly to be referred to the habit of mind 
produced by democracy — the fact, namely, that the 
women dress with great expense and care, the men 
with none whatever. This, as a rule, is true of Amer- 
icans, Australians, and French. 

Unlike as are the Australians to the British, there 
is nevertheless a singular mimicry of British forms 
and ceremonies in the colonies, which is extended to 
the most trifling details of public life. Twice in Aus- 
tralia was I invited to ministerial dinners, given to 
mark the approaching close of the session ; twice also 
was I present at university celebrations, in which home 
w^himsicalities were closely copied. The governors' 
messages to the Colonial Parliaments are travesties of 
those which custom in England leads us to call "the 
Queen's.'^ The very phraseology is closely followed. 
We tind Sir J. Manners Sutton gravely saying: "The 
representatives of the government of New South Wales 



and 01 my government have agreed to an arrangement 
on the border duties . . /' The ^' my" in a democratic 
country like Victoria strikes a stranger as pre-emi- 
nently incongruous, if not absurd. 

The imitation of Cambridge forms by the Univer- 
sity of Sydney is singularly close. One almost ejj;- 
pects to see the familiar blue gown of the ^'bull-dog ' 
thrown across the arm of the first college servant met 
within its precincts. Chancellor, Vice-chancellor, 
Senate, Syndicates, and even Proctors, all are here in 
the antipodes. Registrar, professors, "seniors," fees, 
and "petitions with the University seal attached;" 
"Board of Classical Studies" — the whole corporation 
sits in borrowed plumage ; the very names of the col- 
leges are being imitated: we find already a St. John's. 
The Calendar reads like a parody on the volume is- 
sued every March by Messrs. Deighton. Rules upon 
matriculation, upon the granting of testamurs ; prize- 
books stamped with college arms are named^ ad eundem 
degrees are known, and we have imitations of phrase- 
ology even in the announcement of prizes to " the 
most distinguished candidates for honors in each of 
the aforesaid schools," and in the list of subjects for 
the Moral Science tripos. Lent Term, Trinity Term, 
Michaelmas Term, take the place of the Spring, Sum- 
mer, and Fall Terms of the less pretentious institutions 
in America, and the height of absurdity is reached in 
the regulations upon "academic costume," and on the 
"respectful salutation" by undergraduates of the "fel- 
lows and professors" of the University. The situation 
on a hot-wind day of a member of the Senate, in 
"black silk gown, with hood of scarlet cloth edged 
with white fur, and lined with blue silk, black velvet 
trencher cap," all in addition to his ordinary clothing, 
it is to be presumed, can be imagined only by those 



who know what hot winds are. We English are great 
acclimatizers : we have carried trial by jury to Bengal, 
tenant-right to Oude, and caps and gowns to be worn 
over loongee and paejama at Calcutta University. 
"Who are we, that we should cry out against the 
Jii^ench for " carrying France about with them every- 
where" ? 

The objects of the founders are set forth in the 
charter as " the advancement of religion and morality, 
and the promotion of useful knowledge ;" but as there 
is no theological faculty, no religious test or exercise 
whatever, the philosophy of the lirst portion of the 
phrase is not easily understood. 

In no Western institutions is the radicalism of West- 
ern thought so thoroughly manifested as in the Uni- 
versities ; in no English colonial institutions is Conser- 
vatism so manifest. The contrast between Michigan 
and Sydney is far more striking than that between 
Harvard and old Cambridge. 

Of the religious position of Australia there is little 
to be said : the Wesleyans, Catholics, and Presbyte- 
rians are stronger, and the other denominations weaker, 
than they are at home. The general mingling of in- 
congruous objects and of conflicting races, character- 
istic of colonial life, extends to religious buildings. 
The graceful Wesleyan church, the Chinese joss-bouse, 
and the Catholic cathedral stand not far apart in Mel- 
bourne. In Australia, the mixture of blood is not yet 
great. In South Australia, where it is most complete, 
the Catholics and Wesleyans have great strength. 
Anglicanism is naturally strongest where the race is 
most exclusively British — in Tasmania and New South 
Wales. 

As far as the coast tracts are concerned, Australia, 
as will be seen from what has been said of the indi- 



vidual colonies, is rapidly ceasing to be a land of great 
tenancies, and becoming a land of small freeholds, each 
cultivated by its owner. It need hardly be pointed 
out that, in the interests of the country and of the race, 
this is a happy change. When English rural laborers 
commence to fully realize the misery of their position, 
they will find not only America, but Australia also, 
open to them as a refuge and future home. Looming 
in the distance, we still, however, see the American 
problem of whether the Englishman can live out of 
England. Can he thrive except where mist and damp 
preserve the juices of his frame? He comes from the 
fogs of the Baltic shores, and from the Flemish low- 
lands ; gains in vigor in the south island of New Zea- 
land. In Australia and America — hot and dry — the 
type has already changed. Will it eventually disap- 
pear ? 

It is still an open question whether the change of 
type among the English in America and Australia is 
a climatic adaptation on the part of nature, or a tem- 
porary divergence produced by abnormal causes, and 
capable of being modified by care. 

Before we had done our talk, the ship was pooped 
by a green sea, which, curling in over her tafifrail, 
swept her decks from end to end, and our helmsmen, 
although regular old " hard-a-weather" fellows, had 
difliculty in keeping her upon her course. It was the 
last of the gale, and when we made up our beds upon 
the skylights, the heavens were clear of scud, though 
the moon was still craped with a ceaseless roll of cloud. 



130 GBEATER BRITAIN, 



CHAPTER XV. 

COLONIES. 

"When a Briton takes a survey of the colonies, he 
finds much matter for surprise in the one-sided nature 
of the partnership which exists between the mother 
and the daughter lands. No reason presents itself to 
him why our artisans and merchants should be taxed 
in aid of populations far more wealthy than our own, 
who have not, as we have, millions of paupers to sup- 
port. We at present tax our humblest classes, we 
weaken our defenses, we scatter our troops and fleets, 
and lay ourselves open to panics such as those of 1853 
and 1859, in order to protect against imaginary dan- 
gers the Australian gold-digger and Canadian farmer. 
There is something ludicrous in the idea of taxing St. 
Giles's for the support of Melbourne, and making Dor- 
setshire agricultural laborers pay the cost of defending 
New Zealand colonists in Maori wars. 

It is possible that the belief obtains in Britain among 
the least educated classes of the community that colo- 
nial expenses are rapidly decreasing, if they have not 
already wholly disappeared; but in fact they have for 
some years past been steadily and continuously grow- 
ing in amount. 

As long as we choose to keep up such jrropugnacida 
as Gibraltar, Malta, and Bermuda, we must pay roundly 
for them, as we also must for such costly luxuries as 
our Gold Coast settlements for the suppression of the 
slave-trade; but if we confine the term "colonies" to 



COLONIES. - 131 

Eoglish-speakiiig, white-inhabited, and self-governed 
lands, and exclude on the one hand garrisons such as 
Gibraltar, and on the other mere dependencies like 
the West Indies and Ceylon, we find that our true 
colonies in JS'orth America, Australia, Polynesia, and 
South Africa, involve us nominally in yearly charges 
of almost two millions sterling, and, really, in untold 
expenditure. 

Canada is in all ways the most flagrant case. She 
draws from us some three millions annually for her 
defense, she makes no contribution toward the cost; 
she relies mainly on us to defend a frontier of 4000 
miles, and she excludes our goods by prohibitive duties 
at her ports. In short, colonial expenses which, rightly 
or wrongly, our fathers bore (and that not ungrudg- 
ingly) when they enjoyed a monopoly of colonial trade, 
are borne by us in face of colonial prohibition. What 
the true cost to us of Canada may be is unfortunately 
an open question, and the loss by the weakening of 
our home forces we have no means of computing: but 
when we consider that, on a fair statement of the case, 
Canada would be debited with the cost of a large por- 
tion of the half-pay and recruiting services, of Horse 
Guards and War Office expenses, of arms, accouter- 
ments, barracks, hospitals, and stores, and also with 
the gigantic expenses of two of our naval squadrons, 
we cannot but admit that we must pay at least three 
millions a. year for the hatred that the Canadians pro- 
fess to bear toward the United States. Whatever may 
be the case, however, with regard to Canada, less fault 
is to be found with the cost of the Australian colonies. 
If they bore a portion of the half-pay and recruiting 
expenses as well as the cost of the troops actually 
employed among them in time of peace, and also paid 
their share in the maintenance of the British navy — 



132 GREATEli BBITAIN. 

a share to increase with the increase of theii merchant 
shipping — there would be little to desire, unless, in- 
deed, we should wish that, in exchange for a check 
upon imperial braggadocio and imperial waste, the 
Australian should also contribute toward the expenses 
of imperial wars. 

I^o reason can be shown for our spending millions 
on the defense of Canada against the Americans or in 
aiding the 'Eqw Zealand colonists against the Maories 
that will not apply to their aiding us in case of a 
European war with France, control being given to 
their representatives over our public action in ques- 
tions of imperial concern. Without any such control 
over imperial action, the old Amencan colonists were 
well content to do their share of fighting in imperial 
wars. In 1689, in 1702, and in 1744, Massachusetts 
attacked the French, and, taking from them ISTova 
Scotia and others of their new plantations, handed 
them over to Great Britain. Even when the tax-time 
came, Massachusetts, while declaring that the English 
Parliament had no right to tax colonies, went on to 
say that the king could inform them of the exigencies 
of the public service, and that they were ready '* to 
provide for them if required." 

It is not likely, however, nowadays, that our colo- 
nists would, for any long stretch of time, engage to 
aid us in our purely European wars. Australia would 
scarcely feel herself deeply interested in the guarantee 
of Luxembourg, nor Canada in the affairs of Servia. 
The fact that we in Britain paid our share — or rather 
nearly the whole cost — of the Maori wars would be no 
argument to an Australian, but only an additional 
proof to him of our extraordinary folly. We have 
been educated into a habit of paying with complacency 
other people's bills— not so the Australian settler. 



COLONIES. ■ 133 

As far as Australia is concerned, our soldiers are 
not used as troops at all. The colonists like the show 
of the red-coats, and the military duties are made up 
partly of guard- of-honor work, and partly of the labors 
of police. The colonists well know that in time of 
war we should immediately withdraw our troops, and 
they trust wholly in their volunteers and the colonial 
marine. 

As long as we choose to allow the system to con- 
tinue, the colonists are well content to reap the benefit. 
When we at last decide that it shall cease, they will 
reluctantly consent. It is more than doubtful whether, 
if we were to insist to the utmost upon our rights as 
toward our southern colonies, they would do more 
than grumble and consent to our demands; and there 
is no chance whatever of our asking for more than our 
simple due. 

When you talk to an intelligent Australian, you can 
always see that he fears that separation would be made 
the excuse for the equipment of a great and costly 
Australian fleet — not more necessary then than now — 
and that, however he may talk, he would, rather than 
separate from England, at least do his duty by her. 

The fear of conquest of the Australian colonies if we 
left them to themselves is on the face of it ridiculous. 
It is sufficient, perhaps, to say that the old American 
colonies, when they had but a million and a half of 
people, defended themselves successfully against the 
then all-powerful French, and that there is no instance 
of a self-protected English colony being conquered by 
the foreigner. The American colonies valued so highly 
their independence of the old country in the matter of 
defense that they petitioned the Crown to be allowed 
to fight for themselves, and called the British army by 
the plain name of "grievance." 

VOL. II. 12 



134 GREATER BRITAIN. 

-As foi- our so-called defense of the colonies, in war- 
time we defend ourselves; we defend the colonies only 
during peace. In war-time they are ever left to shift 
for themselves, and they would undoubtedly be better 
lit to do so were they in the habit of maintaining their 
military establishments in time of peace. The present 
system weakens us and them — us, by taxes and by the 
withdrawal of our men and ships ; the colonies, by pre- 
venting the development of that self-reliance which is 
requisite to form a nation's greatness. The successful 
encountering of difficulties is the markino^ feature of 
the national character of the English, and we can hardly 
expect a nation which has never encountered any, or 
which has been content to see them met by others, 
ever to become great. In short, as matters now stand, 
the colonies are a source of military weakness to us, 
and our " protection" of them is a source of danger to 
the colonists. No doubt there are still among us men 
who would have wished to have seen America continue 
in union with England, on the principle on which the 
Russian conscripts are chained each to an old man — to 
keep her from going too fast — and who now consider it 
our duty to defend our colonies at whatever cost, on 
account of the '^prestige" which attaches to the some- 
what precarious tenure of these great lands. With 
such men it is impossible for colonial reformers to 
argue : the stand-points are wholly different. To those, 
however, who admit the injustice of the present system 
to the tax-payers of the mother-country, but who fear 
that her merchants would suffer by its disturbance, 
inasmuch as, in their belief, action on our part would 
lead to a disruption of the tie, we may plead that, even 
should separation be the result, we should be none the 
worse off' for its occurrence. The retention of colonies 
at almost any cost has been defended — so far as it has 



COLONIES, 135 

been supported by argument at all — on the ground 
that the connection conduces to trade, to which argu- 
ment it is sufficient to answer that no one has ever 
succeeded in showing what effect upon trade the con- 
nection can have, and that as excellent examples to 
the contrary we have the fact that our trade with the 
Ionian Islands has greatly increased since their annex- 
ation to the kingdom of Greece, and a much more 
striking fact than even this — namely, that while the 
trade with England of the Canadian Confederation is 
only four-elevenths of its total external trade, or little 
more than one-third, the English trade of the United 
States was in 1860 (before the war) nearly two-thirds 
of its total external trade, in 1861 more than two-thirds, 
and in 1866 (first year after the war) again four-sevenths 
of its total trade. Common institutions, common free- 
dom, and common tongae have evidently far more to 
do with trade than union has; and for purposes of 
commerce and civilization, America is a truer colony 
of Britain than is Canada. 

It would not be difficult, were it necessary, to mul- 
tiply examples whereby to prove that trade with a 
country does not appear to be affected by union with 
or separation from it. Egypt (even when we carefully 
exclude from the returns Indian produce in transport) 
sends us nearly all such produce as she exports, not- 
withstanding that the French largely control the gov- 
ernment, and that we have much loss footino- in the 
country than the Italians, and no more than the Aus- 
trians or Spanish. Our trade with Australia means 
that the Australians want something of us and that we 
need something of them, and that we exchange with 
them our produce as we do in a larger degree with the 
Americans, the Germans, and the French. 

The trade argument being met, and it being remera- 



136 OEEATEB BRITAIN. 

bered that our colonies are no more an outlet for our 
8urj<lu8 population than they would be if the Great 
Mogul ruled over them, as is seen by the fact that of 
every twenty people who leave the United Kingdom, 
one goes to Canada, two to Australia, and sixteen to 
the United States, we come to the " argument" which 
consists in the word "prestige." When examined, 
this cry seems to mean that, in the opinion of the ut- 
terer, extent of empire is power — a doctrine under which 
Brazil ought to be nineteen and a half times, and 
China twenty-six times as powerful as France. Per- 
haps the best answer to the doctrine is a simple con- 
tradiction : those who have read history with most care 
well know that at all times extent of empire has been 
weakness. England's real empire was small enough 
in 1650, yet it is rather doubtful whether her "pres- 
tige" ever reached the height it did while the Croni- 
wellian admirals swept the seas. The idea conveyed 
by the words " mother of free nations" is every bit as 
good as that contained in the cry "prestige," and the 
argument that, as the colonists are British subjects, we 
have no right to cast them adrift so long as they wish 
to continue citizens, is evidently no answer to those 
who merely urge that the colonists should pay their 
own policemen. 

It may, perhaps, be contended that the possession 
of "colonies" tends to preserve us from the curse of 
small island countries, the dwarfing of mind which 
would otherwise make us Guernsey a little magnified. 
If this be true, it is a powerful argument in favor of 
continuance in the present system. It is a question, 
however, whether our real preservation from the insu- 
larity we deprecate is not to be found in the possession 
of true colonies — of plantations such as America, in 
short — rather than in that of mere dependencies. That 



COLONIES. 137 

which raises us above the provincialism of citizenship 
of little England is our citizenship of the greater Saxon- 
dora which includes all that is best and wisest in the 
world. 

From the foundation, separation would be harmless, 
does not of necessity follow the conclusion, separation 
is to be desired. This much only is clear — that we 
need not hesitate to demand that Australia should do 
her duty. 

With the more enlightened thinkers of England, 
separation from the colonies has for many years been 
a favorite idea, but as regards the Australias it would 
hardly be advisable. If we allow that it is to the in- 
terest both of our race and of the world that the Aus- 
tralias should prosper, we have to ask whether they 
would do so in a higher degree if separated from the 
mother-country than if they remained connected with 
her and with each other by a federation. It has often 
been said that, instead of the varying relations which 
now exist between Britain and America, we should 
have seen a perfect friendship had we but permitted 
the American colonies to go their way in peace; but' 
the example does not hold in the case of Australia, 
which is by no means wishful to go at all. 

Under separation we should, perhaps, find the colo- 
nies better emigration-fields for our surplus population 
than they are at present. Many of our emigrants who 
liock to the United States are attracted by the idea 
that they are going to become citizens of a new nation 
instead of dependents upon an old one. On the separa- 
tion of Australia from England we might expect that 
a portion of these sentimentalists would be diverted 
from a colony necessarily jealous of us so long as we 
hold Canada, to one which from accordance of interests 
is likely to continue friendly or allied. This argument, 

12* 



138 OREATER BRITAIN. 

however, would have no weight with those who desire 
the independence of Canada, and who look upon 
America as still our colony. 

Separation, we may then conclude, though infinitely 
hetter than a continuance of the existing one-sided tie, 
would, in a healthier state of our relations, not be to 
the interest of Britain, although it would perhaps be 
morally beneficial to Australia. Any relation, how- 
ever, would be preferable to the existing one of mutual 
.ndifiference and distrust. Recognizing the fact that 
Australia has come of age, and calling on her, too, to 
recognize it, we should say to the Australian colonists: 
" Our present system cannot continue ; will you amend 
it, or separate ?" The woret thing that can happen to 
us is that we should '^ drift" blindly into separation. 

After all, the strongest of the arguments in favor 
of separation is the somewhat paradoxical one that it 
would bring us a step nearer to the virtual confedera- 
tion of the English race. 



P^RT IV. 

INDIA. 



(139) 



A REGULAR and uniform system of spelling of native 
names and other words has lately been brought into 
common use in India, and adopted by the govern- 
ment. Not without hesitation, I have decided upon 
ignoring this improvement, and confining myself to 
spellings known to and used by the English in Eng- 
land, for whom especially I am writing. 

I am aware that there is no system in the spelling, 
and that it is scientifically absurd ; nevertheless, the 
new government spelling is not yet sufficiently well 
understood in England to warrant its use in a book 
intended for general circulation. The scientific spell- 
ing is not always an improvement to the eye, more- 
over: Talookdars of Oude may not be right, but it is 
a neater phrase than "Taalukhdars oJL Awdh;" and 
it will probably be long before we in England write 
"kuii" for coolie, or adopt the spelling '' T4td hordes." 



(140) 



CHAPTER I. 

MARITIME CEYLON. 

We failed to sigbt the Island of Cocoas, a territory 
where John Ross is king— a worthy Scotchman, who 
having settled down in mid-ocean, some hundreds of 
miles from any port, proceeded to annex hiraseif to 
Java and the Dutch. On being remonstrated with, 
he was made to see his error ; and, being appointed 
governor of and consul to himself and laborers, now 
hoists the union-jack, while his island has a red line 
drawn under its name upon the map. Two days after 
quitting John Ross's latitudes, we crossed the line in 
the heavy noonday of the equatorial belt of calms. 
The sun itself passed the equator the same day; so, 
after having left Australia at the end of autumn, I 
suddenly found myself in Asia in the early spring. 
Mist obscured the skies except at dawn and sunset, 
when there was a clear air, in which floated cirro- 
cumuli with flat bases — clouds cut in half, as it 
seemed — and we were all convinced that Homer 
must have seen the Indian Ocean, so completely 
did the sea in the equatorial belt realize his epithet 
*' purple" or "wine-dark." All day long the flying- 
Ash — "those good and excellent creatures of God," 
as Drake styled them — were skimming over the water 
on every side. The Elizabethan captain, who knew 
their delicacy of taste, attributed their freedom from 
the usual slime of flsh, and their wholesome nature, 
to "their continued exercise in both air and water." 
The heat was great, and I made the discovery that 

(141) 



142 GBEATER BRITAIN, 

Auetralians as well as Americans can put their feet 
above their heads. It raav be asserted that the heio^ht 
above the dock of the feet of passengers on board 
ocean steamers varies directly as the heat, and in- 
versely as the number of hours before dinner. 

In the afternoon of the day we crossed the line, 
we sighted a large East Indiaman lying right in our 
course, and so little way was she making that, on 
coming up with her, w^e had to port our helm, in 
order not to run her down. She hailed us, and we 
lay-to while she sent a boat aboard us with her mail; 
for althousfh she was already a month out from Cal- 
cutta and bound for London, our letters would reach 
home before she was round the Cape — a singular com- 
mentary upon the use of sailing ships in the Indian 
seas. Before the boat had left our side, the ships had 
iioatod so close together, through attraction, that we 
had to make several revolutions with the screw in 
oilier to prevent collision. 

When we, who wei^e all sleeping upon deck, were 
aroused by the customary growl from the European 
quartermaster of **Four o'clock, sir! Going to swab 
decks, sir! Get up, sir!" given with the flare of the 
lantern in our eves, we were still over a hundred miles 
from Galle; but before the sun had risen, we caught 
sight of Adam's Peak, a purple mass upon the northern 
sky, and soon we were racing with a French steamer 
from Saigon, and with a number of white-sailed native 
craft from the Maldives. Within a few hours, we were 
at anchor in a small bay, surrounded with lofty cocoa- 
palms, in which were lying, tossed by a rolling swell, 
some dozen husre steamers, vard-arm to vard-arm — the 
harbor of Point de Galle. Every ship was flying her 
ensign, and in the damp hot air the old tattered union- 
jacks seemed brilliant crimson, and the dull green of 



MARITIME CEYLON, 143 

the cocoa-palms became a dazzling emerald. The scene 
wanted but the bright plumage of the Panama macaws. 

Once seated in the piazza of the Oiiental Company's 
hotel, the best managed in the East, I had before me a 
curious scene. Along the streets were pouring silent 
crowds of tall aud graceful girls, as we at the lirst 
glance supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices; 
their hair carried off the face with a decorated hoop, 
and canght at the back by a high tortoise-shell comb. 
As they drew near, mustaches began to show, and I 
saw that they were men, while walking with them 
were women naked to the waist, combless, and far more 
rough and *' manly" than their husbands. Petticoat 
and chignon are male institutions in Ceylon, and time 
after time I had to look twice before I could fix the 
passer's sex. My rule at last became to set down every- 
body that was womanly as a man, and everybody that 
was manly as a woman. Cinghalese, Kandians, Tamils 
from South India, and Moormen with crimson caftans 
and shaven crowns, formed the body of the great crowd ; 
but, besides these, there were Portuguese, Chinese, 
Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Englishmen, Malays, Dutchmen, 
and half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled 
Arabian woman or a Veddah — one of the aboriginal in- 
habitants of the isle. Ceylon has never been independ- 
ent, and in a singular mixture of races her ports bear 
testimony to the number of the foreign conquests. 

Two American missionaries were among the passers- 
by, but one of them, detecting strangers, came up to 
the piazza in search of news. There had been no loss 
of national characteristics in these men; — they were 
brimful of the mixture of earnestness and quaint pro- 
fanity which distinguishes the New England puritan : 
one of them described himself to me as "just a kind 
of journeyman soul-saver, like." 



Hi GREATER BRITAIN. 

The Australian strangers were not long left unmo- 
lested by more serious intruders than grave Vermont- 
ers. The cry of "baksheesh" — an Arabian word that 
goes from Gibraltar to China, and from Ceylon to the 
Kh^'ber Pass, and which has reached us in the form of 
" boxes" in our phrase Christmas-boxes — was the first 
native word I heard in the East, at Galle, as it was 
afterward the last, at Alexandria. One of the beggars 
was an Albino, fair as a chtld in a Hampshire lane ; 
one of those strange sports of nature from whom Cin- 
ghalese tradition asserts the European races to be 
sprung. 

The beggars were soon driven oft' by the hotel ser- 
vants, and better licensed plunderers began their work. 
" Ah safeer, ah rupal, ah imral, ah mooney stone, ah 
opal, ah amtit, ah !" was the cry from every quarter, 
and jewel-sellers of all the nations of the East de- 
scended on us in a swarm. "Me givee yon written 
guarantee dis real stone;" "Yes, dat real stone; but 
dis good stone — dat no good stone — no water. Ah, 
see!" *'Dat no good stone. Ah, sahib, you tell good 
stone: all dese bad stone, reg'lar England stone. You 
go by next ship? JSTo? Ah, den you come see me shop. 
D^se ship-passenger stone — humbuk stone. Ship gone, 
den you come me shop ; see good stone. When you 
come? eh? when you come?" "Ah, eafeer, ah catty- 
eye, ah pinkee collal!" Meanwhile every Galle-dwell- 
ing European, at the bar of the hotel, was adding to 
the din by shouting to the native servants, "Boy, turn 
out these fellows, and stop their noise." This cry of 
"boy" is a relic of the old Dutch times: it was the 
Hollander's term for his slave, and hence for every 
member of the inferior race. The first servant that I 
heard called "boy" was a tottering, white-haired old 
man. 



MARITIME CEYLON. 145 

The gems of Ceylon have long been famed. One 
thousand three hundred and seventy years ago, the 
Chinese records tell us that Ceylon, then tributary to 
the empire, sent presents to the Brother of the Moon, 
one of the gifts being a " lapis-lazuli spittoon." It is 
probable that some portion of the million and a half 
pounds sterling which are annually absorbed in this 
small island, but four-lifths the size of Ireland, is con- 
sumed in the setting of the precious stones for native 
use ; every one you meet v^ears four or live heavy sil- 
ver rings, and sovereigns are melted down to make 
gold ornaments. 

Rushing away from the screaming crowd of peddlers, 
I went with some of my Australian friends to stroll 
upon the ramparts and enjoy the evening salt breeze. 
"We met several bodies of white-faoed Europeans, saun- 
tering like ourselves, and dressed like us in white 
trowsers and loose white jackets and pith hats. What 
we looked like I do not know, but they resembled 
ships' stewards. At last it struck me that they were 
soldibrs, and upon inquiring I found that these washed- 
out dh,wdlers represented a British regiment of the line. 
I was by tills time used to see linesmen out of scarlet. 
having beheld a parade in bushranger-beards and 
blue-serge "jumpers" at Taranaki in ]^ew Zealand; 
but one puts up easier with the soldier-bushranger 
than with the soldier-steward. 

The climate of the day had been exquisite with its 
bright air and cooling breeze, and I had begun to think 
that those who knew Acapulco and Echuca could afibrd 
to laugh at the East, with its thermometer at 88°. The 
reckoning came at night, however, for by dark all the 
breeze was gone, and the thermometer, instead of fall- 
ing, had risen to 90° when I lay down to moan and 
wait for dawn. As I was dropping off to sleep at about 

VOL. II. 13 



146 GEE ATE R BRITAIN, 

four o'clock, a Dative came round and closed the doors, 
to shut out the dangerous land-breeze that springs up 
at that hour. Again, at half-past ^lyq, it was cooler, 
and I had begun to doze, when a cannon-shot, lired ap- 
parently under my bed, brought me upon my feet with 
something more than a start. I remembered the say- 
ing of the Western boy before Petersburg, when he 
heard for the first time the five o'clock camp-gun, and 
called to his next neighbor at the fire, "' Say, Bill, did 
you hap to hear how partic'lar loud the day broke just 
now?" for it was the morning-gun, which in Ceylon is 
always fired at the same time, there being less than au 
hour's difference between the longest and shortest days. 
Although it was still pitch dark, the bugles began to 
sound the reveille on every side — in the infantry lines, 
the artillery barracks, and the lines of the Malay regi- 
ment, the well-known Ceylon Rifles. Ten minutes 
afterward, when I had bathed by lamplight, I was 
eating plantains and taking my morning tea in a cool 
room lit by the beams of the morning sun, so short is 
the April twilight in Ceylon. 

It is useless to consult the thermometer about heat : 
a European can labor in the open air in South Aus- 
tralia with the thermometer at 110° in the shade, while, 
with a thermometer at 88°, 'the nights are unbearable 
in Ceylon. To discover whether the climate of a place 
be really hot, examine its newspapers; and if you find 
the heat recorded, you may make up your mind that it 
is a variable climate, but if no "remarkable heat" or 
similar announcements appear, then you may be sure 
that you are in a permanently hot place. It stands to 
reason that no one in the tropics ever talks of "tropical 
heat." 

In so equable a climate, the apathy of the Cinghalese 
is not surprising; but they are not merely lazy, they 



MARITIME CEYLON. 147 

are a cowardly, effeminate, and revengeful race. They 
Bleep and smoke, and smoke and sleep, rousing them- 
selves only once in the day to snatch a bowl of curry 
and rice, or to fleece a white man ; and so slowly do the 
people run the race of life that even elephantiasis, com- 
mon here, does not seem to put the sufferer far behind 
his fellow-men. Buddhism is no mystery when ex- 
pounded under this climate. See a few Cinghalese 
stretched in the shade of a' cocoa-palm, and you can 
conceive Buddha sittii.^^ cross-legged for ten thousand 
years contemplating his ;^wn perfection. 

The second morning t.Sat I spent in Galle, the cap- 
tain of the Bombay was kind enough to send his gig 
for me to the landing-st, ps at dawn, and his Malay 
crew soon rowed me to the ship, where the captain 
joined me, and we pulled across the harbor to Water- 
ing-place Point, and bathed in the shallow sea, out of 
the reach of sharks. When we had dressed, we went 
on to a jetty, to look into the deep water just struck by 
the rising sun. I should have marveled at the trans- 
lucency of the waters had not the awful clearness with 
which the bottoms of the Canadian lakes stand revealed 
in evening light been fresh within my memory, but here 
the bottom was fairly paved with corallines of inconceiv- 
able brilliancy of color, and tenanted by still more gor- 
geous tish. Of the two that bore the palm, one was a 
little fish of mazarine blue, without a speck of any other 
color, and perfect too in shape; the second, a silver 
fish, with a band of soft brown velvet round its neck, 
and another about its tail. In a still more sheltered 
cove the tish were so thick that dozens of Moors were 
throwing into the water, with the arm-twist of a fly- 
fisher, bare hooks, which they jerked through the shoal 
and into the air, never failing to bring them up clothed 
with a fish, caught most times by the fin. 



148 GREATER BRITAIN. 

In the evening, two of us tried a native dinner, at a 
house where Ciughalese gentlemen dine when they 
come into Galle on business. Our fare was as follows: 
First course: a curry of the delicious seir-fish, a sort 
of n^ackerel ; a prawn curry ; a bread-fruit and cocoa- 
nut curry; a Brinjal curry, and a dish made of jack- 
fruit, garlic* and mace; all washed down by iced water. 
Second course: plantains, and very old arrack in thim- 
ble-glasses, followed by black coffee. Of meat there 
was no sign, as the Cinghalef>4 rarely touch it; and, 
although we liked our vege^^iirian dinner, my friend 
passed a criticism in action ^on it by dining again at 
the hotel- ordinary one hou-' later. "We agreed, too, 
that the sickly smell of co3oanut would cleave to us 
for weeks. 

Starting with an Australian friend, at the dawn of 
my third day in the island, I took the coach by the 
coast road to Columbo. We drove along a magnificent 
road in an avenue of giant cocoanut- palms, with the sea 
generally within easy sight, and with a native hut at 
each few yards. Every two or three miles, the road 
crossed a lagoon, alive with bathers, and near the 
bridge was generally a village, bazaar, and Buddhist 
temple, built pagoda-shape, and tilled with worshipers. 
The road was thronged with gayly-dressed Cinghalese; 
and now and again we would pass a Buddhist priest 
in satfron- colored robes, hastening along, his umbrella 
borne over him by a boy clothed from top to toe in 
white. The umbrellas of the priests are of yellow 
silk, and shaped like ours, but other natives carry 
fiat-topped umbrellas, gilt, or colored red and black. 
The Cinghalese farmers we met traveling to their 
temples in carts drawn by tiny bullocks. Such was 
the brightness of the air, that the people, down to the 
very beggars, seemed clad in holiday attire. 



A 



MARITIME CEYLON, 149 

As we journeyed on, we began to find more variety 
in the scenery and vegetation, and were charmed with 
the scarlet-blossomed cotton-tree, and with the areca, 
or betel-nnt palm. The cocoanut groves, too, were 
carpeted with an undergrowth of orchids and ipeca- 
cuanha, and here and there was a bread-fruit tree or 
an hibiscus. 

In Ceylon we have retained the Dutch posting sys- 
tem, and small light coaches, drawn by four or six 
small horses at a gallop, run over excellent roads, 
carrying, besides the passengers, two boys behind, 
who shout furiously whenever vehicles or passengers 
obstruct the mails, and who at night carry torches high 
in the air, to light the road. Thus we dashed through 
the bazaars and cocoa groves, then across the golden 
sands covered with rare shells, and fringed on the one 
side with the bright blue dancing sea, dotted with 
many a white sail, and on the other side with deep 
green jungle, in which were sheltered dark lagoons. 
Once in a while, we would drive out on to a plain, 
varied by clumps of ^g and tulip trees, and, looking 
to the east, would sight the purple mountains of the 
central range; then, dashing again into the thronged 
bazaars, would see little but the bright palm-trees re- 
lieved upon an azure sky. The road is one continuous 
village, for the population is twelve times as dense in 
the western as in the eastern provinces of Ceylon, ^o 
wonder that ten thousand natives have died of cholera 
within the last few months ! All this dense coast popula- 
tion is supported by the cocoanut, for there are in Cey- 
lon 200,000 acres under cocoa-palms, which yield from 
seven to eight hundred million cocoanuts a year, and 
are worth two millions sterling. 

Near Bentotte, where we had lunched oif horrible 
oj^sters of the pearl-yielding kind, we crossed the Kalu- 

13* 



150 GREATER BRITAIN. 

ganga River, densely fringed with mangrove, and in its 
waters saw a python swimming bravely toward the 
shore. Snakes are not so formidable as land-leeches, 
the Cinghalese and planters say, and no one hears of 
many persons being bitten, though a great reward for 
an antidote to the cobra bite has lately been offered by 
the Rajah of Travancore. 

As we entered what the early maps style "The 
Christian Kyngdora of Colombo," though where they 
found their Christians no one knows, our road lay 
through the cinnamon gardens, which are going out of 
cultivation, as they no longer pay, although the cinna- 
mon laurel is a spice-grove in itself, giving cinnamon 
from its bark, camphor from the roots, clove oil from 
its leaves. The plant grows wild about the island, and 
is cut and peeled by the natives at no cost save that 
of children's labor, which they do not count as cost at 
all. The scene in the gardens that still remain was 
charming : the cinnamon-laurel bushes contrasted well 
with the red soil, and the air was alive with dragon- 
flies, moths, and winged-beetles, while the softness of 
the evening breeze had tempted out the half-caste 
Dutch "burgher" families of the city, who were driv- 
ing and walking clothed in white, the ladies with their 
jet hair dressed with natural flowers. The setting sun 
threw brightness without heat into the gay scene. 

A friend who had horses ready for us at the hotel 
where the mail-coach stopped, said that it was not too 
late for a ride through the fort, or European town in- 
side the walls ; so, cantering along the esplanade, 
where the oflicers of the garrison were enjoying their 
evening ride, we crossed the moat, and found ourselves 
in what is perhaps the most graceful street in the 
'^oi'lci; — a double range of long low houses of bright 
white stone, with deep piazzas, buried in maises of 



MARITIME CEYLON, 151 

bright foliage, in which the fire-flies were beginning 
to plaj. In the center of the fort is an Italian cam- 
panile, which serves at once as a belfry, a clock-tower, 
and a light-house. In the morning, before sunrise, we 
climbed this tower for the view\ The central range 
stood up sharply on the eastern sky, as the sun was 
still hid behind it, and to the southeast there towered 
high the peak where Adam mourned his son a hundred 
years. In color, shape, and height, the Cinghalese 
Alps resemble the Central Apennines, and the view 
from Columbo is singularly like that from Pesaro on 
the Adriatic. As we looked landwards from the cam- 
panile, the native town was mirrored in the lake, and 
outside the city the white-coated troops were marching 
by companies on to the parade-ground, whence we 
could faintly hear the distant bands. 

Driving back in a carriage, shaped like a street cab, 
but with fixed Venetians instead of sides and windows, 
we visited the curing establishment of the Ceylon 
Cofiee Company, where the coftee from the hills is 
dried and sorted. Thousands of native girls are era- 
ployed in coffee-picking at the various stores, but it is 
doubted whether the whole of this labor is not wasted, 
the berries being sorted according to their shape and 
size — characteristics which seem in no way to affect the 
flavor. The Ceylon exporters say that if we choose to 
pay twice as much for shapely as for ill-shaped berries, 
it is no business of theirs to refuse to humor us by 
sorting. 

The most remarkable institution in Columbo is the 
steam factory where the government make or mend 
such machinery as their experts certify cannot be dealt 
with at any private works existing in the island. The 
government elephants are kept at the same place, but 
I found them at work up country on the Kandy road. 



152 QBE ATE R BRITAIN. 

In passing through the native town upon Slave 
Island, we saw some French Catholic priests in their 
working jungle dresses of blue serge. They have met 
with singular successes in Ceylon, having made 150,000 
converts, while the English and American missions 
have between them only 30,000 natives. The Protest- 
ant missionaries in Ceylon complain much of the plant- 
ers, whom they accuse of declaring, when they wish to 
hire men, that " no Christian need apply;" but it is a 
remarkable fact that neither Protestants nor Catholics 
can make converts among the self-supported "Moor- 
men," the active pushing inhabitants of the ports, who 
are Mohammedans to a man. The chief cause of the 
success of the Catholics among the Cinghalese seems 
to be the remarkable earnestness of the French and 
Italian missionary priests. Our English missionaries 
in the East are too often men incapable of bearing 
fatigue or climate ; ignorant of every trade, and inferior 
even in teaching and preaching powers to their rivals. 
It is no easy matter to spread Christianity among the 
Cinghalese, the inventors of Buddhism, the most an- 
cient and most widely spread of all the religions of the 
world. Every Buddhist Urmly believes in the potential 
perfection of man, and is incapable of understanding 
the ideas of original sin and redemption ; and a Cin- 
ghalese Buddhist — passionless himself — cannot com- 
prehend the passionate worship that Christianity re- 
quires. The Catholics, however, do not neglect the 
Eastern iield for missionary labor. Four of their 
bishops from Cochin China and Japan were met by me 
in Galle, upon their way to liome. 

Our drive was brought to an end by a visit to the 
old Dutch quarter — a careful imitation of Amsterdam ; 
indeed, one of its roads still bears the portentous Bata- 
vian name of Dam Street. Their straight canals, and 



i 

I 



MARITIME CEYLON. 153 

formal lines of trees, the Hollanders have carried with 
them throughout the world; but in Columbo, not con- 
tent with manufacturing imitation canals, that began 
and ended in a wall, they dug great artificial lakes to 
recall their well-loved Hague. 

The same evening, I set oft' by the new railway for 
Kandy and Nuwara Ellia (pronounced Nooralia) in the 
hills. Having no experience of the climate of mountain 
regions in the tropics, I expected a merely pleasant 
change, and left Columbo wearing my white kit, which 
served me well enough as fiir as Ambe Pusse — the rail- 
way terminus, which we reached at ten o'clock at night. 
We started at once by coach, and had not driven far 
up the hills in the still moonlight before the cold be- 
came extreme, and I was saved from a severe chill only 
by the kindness of the coftee-planter who shared the 
back seat with me, and who, being well clad in woolen, 
lent me his great-coat. After this incident, we chatted 
pleasantly without fear of interruption from our sole 
companion — a native girl, who sat silently chewing 
betel all the way — and reached Kaudy before dawn. 
Telling the hotel servants to wake me in an hour, I 
wrapped myself in a blanket — the first I had seen since 
I left Australia — and enjoyed a refreshing" sleep. 



154 GREATER BRITAIN. 



CHAPTEE 11. 



KANDY. 



Tbe early morning was foggy and cold as an October 
dawn in an JEnsrlish forest ; but before I had been long 
in the gardens of the Government House, the sun rose, 
and the heat returned once more. After wandering 
among the petunias and fan-palms of the gardens, I 
passed on into the city, the former capital of the 
Kandian or highland kingdom, and one of the holiest* 
of Buddhist towns. The kingdom was never con- 
quered by the Portuguese or Dutch while they held 
the coasts, and was not overrun by us till 1815, while 
it has several times been in rebellion since that date. 
The people still retain their native customs in a high 
degree: for instance, the Kandian husband does not 
take his wife's inheritance unless he lives with her on 
her father's land: if she lives with him, she forfeits 
her inheritance. Kandian law, indeed, is expressly 
maintained by us except in the matters of polygamy 
and polyandry, although the maritime Cinghalese are 
governed, as are the English in Ceylon and at the 
Cape, by the civil code of Holland. 

The difference between the Kandian and coast Cin- 
ghalese is very great. At Kandy, I found the men 
wearing flowing crimson robes and flat-topped caps, 
while their faces were lighter in color than those of 
the coast people, and many of them had beards. The 
women also wore the nose-ring in a diflerent way, and 
were clothed above as well as below the waist. It is 



EANDY, 155 

possible that some day we may iinfortun lately heat 
more of this energetic and warlike people. 

The city is one that dwells long in the mind. The 
Upper Town is one great garden, so numerous are 
the sacred groves, vocal with the song of the Eastern 
orioles, but here and there are dotted about pagoda- 
shaped temples, identical in form with those of Tartary 
two thousand miles away, and from these there pro- 
ceeds a roar of tomtoms that almost drowns the song. 
One of these temples contains the holiest of Buddhist 
relics, the tooth of Buddha, which is yearly carried in 
a grand procession. When we first aimexed the Kan- 
dian kingdom, we recognized the Buddhist Church, 
made our officers take part in the procession of the 
Sacred Tooth, and sent a State ottering to the shrine. 
Times are changed since then, but the Buddhist priests 
are still exempt from certain taxes. All round the 
sacred inclosures are ornamented walls, w^ith holy 
sculptured figures ; and in the Lower Town are fresh- 
water lakes and tanks, formed by damming the Mavali- 
ganga Kiver, and also, in some measure, holy. An 
atmosphere of Buddhism pervades all Kandy. 

From Kandy, I visited the cofi[ee-district of which it 
is the capital and center, but I was much disappointed 
with regard to the amount of land that is still open to 
coftee-cultivation. At the Government Botanic Garden 
at Peredenia (where the jalap plant, the castor-oil plant, 
and the ipecacuanha were growing side by side), I was 
told that the shrub does not flourish under 1500 nor 
over 3000 or 4000 feet above sea-level, and that all the 
best coflee-land is already planted. Coffee-growing has 
already done so much for Ceylon that it is to be hoped 
that it has not reached its limit: in thirty-three years 
it has doubled her trade ten times, and to England 
alone she now sends two millions' worth of coffee every 



156 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

year. The central district of the island, in which lie 
the hills and cotfee-countrj, is, with the exception of 
the towns, politically not a portion of Ceylon: there 
are English capital, English management, and Indian 
labor, and the cocoa-palm is unknown; Tamil laborers 
are exclusively employed upoii the plantations, although 
the carrying trade, involving but little labor, is in the 
hands of the Cinghalese. No such official discourage- 
ment is shown to the European planters in Ceylon as 
that which they experience in India; and were there 
but more good coffee-lands and more capital, all would 
be well. The planters say that, after two years' heavy 
expenditure and dead loss, 20 per cent, can be made 
by men who take in sufficient capital, but that no one 
ever does take capital enough for the land he buys, and 
that they all have to borrow from one of the Columbo 
companies at 12 per cent., and are then bound to ship 
their coffee through that company alone. It is re- 
garded as an open question by many disinterested 
friends of Ceylon whether it might not be wise for the 
local government to advance money to the planters; 
but besides the fear of jobbery, there is the objection 
to this course, that the government, becoming inter- 
ested in the success of coffee-planting, might also come 
to connive at the oppression of the native laborers. 
This oppression of the people lies at the bottom of that 
Dutch system which is often held up for our imitation 
in Ceylon. 

Those who narrate to us the effects of the Java 
system forget that it is not denied that m the tropical 
islands, with an idle population and a rich soil, com- 
pulsory labor may be the only way of developing the 
resources of the countries, but they fail to show the 
justification for our developing the resources of the 
country by such i?ieans, The Dutch culture-system puts 



KANDY. 157 

a planter down upon the crown lands, and, having 
made advances to him, leaves it to him to find out 
how he shall repay the government. Forced labor 
— under whatever name — is the natural result. 

The Dutch, moreover, bribe the great native chiefs 
by princely salaries and vast percentage upon the 
crops their people raise, and force the native agri- 
culturists to grow spices lor the Royal Market of 
Amsterdam. Of the purchase of these spices the gov- 
ernment has a monopoly: it buys them at what price 
it will, and, selling again in Europe to the world, 
clears annually some <£4,000,000 sterling by the job. 
That plunder, slavery, and famine often follow the 
extension of their system is nothing to the Dutch. 
Strict press-laws prevent the Dutch at home from 
hearing anything of the discontent in Java, except 
when famine or insurrection calls attention to the isle ; 
and .£4,000,000 a year profit, and half the expenses of 
their navy paid for them by one island in the Eastern 
seas, make up for many deaths of brown-faced people 
by starvation. 

The Dutch often deny that the government retains 
the monopoly of export ; but the fact of the matter is 
that the Dutch Trading Company, who have the mo- 
nopoly of the exports of the produce of crown lands — 
which amount to two-thirds of the total exports of the 
isle — are mere agents of the government. 

It is hard to say that, apart from the nature of the 
culture-system, the Dutch principle of making a profit 
out of the countries which they rule is inconsistent 
with the position of a Christian nation. It is the 
ancient system of countries having possessions in the 
East, and upon our side we are not able to show any 
definite reasons in favor of our course of scrupulously 
keeping separate the Indian revenue, and spending 

VOL. II. 14 



158 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

Indian profits upon India and Cinglialese in Ceylon, 
except such reasons as would logically lead to our' 
quitting Jndia altogether. That the Dutch should 
make a profit out of Java is perhaps not more im- 
moral than that they should be there. At the same 
time, the character of the Dutch system lowers the 
tone of the whole Dutch nation, and especially of those 
who have any connection with the Indies, and eftectu- 
ally prevents future amendment. AVith our system, 
there is some chance of right being done, so small is 
our self-interest in the wrong. From the fact that no 
surplus is sent home from Ceylon, she is at least free 
from that bane of Java, — the desire of the local au- 
thorities to increase as much as possible the valuable 
productions of their districts, even at the risk of famine, 
provided only that they may hope to put ofi'the famine 
until after their time — a desire that produces the result 
that subaltern Dutch ofiicers who observe in their in- 
teo:ritv the admirable rules which have been made for 
the protection of the native population are heartily 
abused for their ridiculous scrupulosity, as it is styled. 
]N^otto be carried away by the material success of the 
Dutch system, it is as well to bear in mind its secret 
history. A private company — the Dutch Trading 
Society — was founded at Amsterdam in 1824, the then 
King being the largest shareholder. The company 
was in difiiculties in 1830, when the King, finding he 
was losing mone^^ fast, sent out as Governor-General 
of the Dutch East Indies his personal friend Van den 
Bosch. The next vear, the culture-svstem, with all its 
attendant horrors, was introduced into Java by Van den 
Bosch, the Dutch Trading Society being made agents 
for the government. The result was the extraordinary 
prosperity of the company, and the leaving by the mer- 
chant-king of a private fortune of fabulous amount. 



KANDY. 159 

The Dutch system has been defe iided by every con- 
ceivable kind of blind misrepresentation; it has even 
been declared, by writers who ought certainly to know 
better, that the four millions of surplus that Holland 
draws from Java, being profits on trade, are not taxa- 
tion ! Even the blindest admirers of the system are 
forced, however, to admit that it involves tke absolute 
prohibition of missionary enterprise, and total exclu- 
sion from knowledge of the Java people. 

The Ceylon planters have at present political as well 
as tinancial ditiiculties on their hands. They have 
petitioned the Queen for " self-government for Cey- 
lon," and for control of the revenue by " representa- 
tives of the public" — excellent principles, if "public" 
meant public, and "Ceylon," Ceylon; but, when we 
inquire of the planters what they really mean, we tind 
that by "Ceylon" they understand Galle and Columbo 
Fort, and by "the public" they mean themselves. 
There are at present six unofficial members of the 
Council: of these, the whites have three members, the 
Dutch burghers one, and the natives two; and the 
planters expect the same proportions to be kept in a 
Council to which supreme power shall be intrusted in 
the disposition of the revenues. They are, indeed, 
careful to explain that the}' in no way desire the exten- 
sion of representative institutions to Ceylon. 

The first thing that strikes the English traveler in 
Ceylon is the apparent slightness of our hold upon the 
country. In my journey from Galle to Columbo, by 
early morning and mid day, I met no white man; from 
Columbo to Kandy, I traveled with one, but met none; 
at Kandy, I saw no whites; at Nuwara Ellia, not half 
a dozen. On my return, I saw no whites between 
Nuwara Ellia and Ambe Pusse, where there was a white 
man in the railway-station; f.nd on my return by even- 



160 GREATER BRITAIN. - 

ing from Columbo to Galle, in all the thronging crowds 
along the roads there was not a single European. 
There are hundreds of Cinghalese in the interior who 
live and die and never see a white man. Out of the 
two and a quarter millions of people who dwell in what 
the planters call the "colony of Ceylon," there a-re but 
8000 Europeans, of whom 1500 are our soldiers, and 
250 our civilians. Of the European non-oliicial class, 
there are but 1300 persons, or about 500 grown-up men. 
The proposition of the Planters' Association is that we 
should confide the despotic government over two and 
a quarter millions of Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Hin- 
doo laborers to these 500 English Christian employers. 
It is not the Cejdon planters who have a grievance 
against us, but we who have a serious complaint against 
them; so flourishing a dependency should certainly 
provide for all the costs of her. defense. 

Some of the mountain views between Kandy and 
Nuwara Ellia are full of grandeur, though they lack 
the New Zealand snows; but none can match, for 
variety and color, that which I saw on my return from 
the ascent to the Kaduganava Pass, where you look 
over a foreground of giant-leaved talipot and slender 
areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the scarlet 
blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with 
banjuin-tree groves and broken by wooded hills. On 
either side, the deep valley-bottoms are carpeted with 
bright green — the wet rice-lands, or terraced paddy- 
fields, from which the natives gather crop after crop 
throughout the year. 

In the union of rich foliage with deep color and 
grand forms, no scenery save that of New Zealand can 
bear comparison with that of the hill country of Ceylon, 
unless, indeed, it be the scenery of Java and the fat 
Eastern Isles. 



MADE AS TO CALCUTTA. 161 



CHAPTER TIL 



MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 



Spending but a single day in Madras — an inferior 
Oolumbo — I passed on to Calcutta with a pleasant 
remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs about 
the chief city of what is still called by Bengal civilians 
" The Benighted Presidency." Small as are the houses, 
poor as are the shops, every one looks well-to-do, and 
everybody happy, from the not undeservedly famed 
cooks at the club to the catamaran men on the shore. 
Coffee and good government have of late done much 
for Madras. 

The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is alto- 
gether inferior to the iiue-weather swell on the west 
coast of New Zealand, and only to be dignified and 
promoted into surfship by men of that fine imagination 
which will lead them to sniff the spices a day before 
they reach Ceylon, or the pork and molasses when off 
Nantucket light-ship. The row through the firet roller 
in the lumbering Massullah boat, manned by a dozen 
sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the 
nrst and second lines of spray, and then the dash for 
shore, the crew singing their measured "Ah! lah! 
Idlala ! — ah ! lah ! Idiala !" the stroke coming with the 
accented syllable, and the helmsman shrieking with 
excitement, is a more pretentious ceremony than that 
which accompanies the crossing of Hokitika bar, but 
the passage is a far less dangerous one. The Massullah 

14* 



162 OREATER BRITAIN. 

boats are like empty hay-barges on the Thames, but 
built without nails, so that they ''give" instead of 
breaking up when battered by the sand on one side 
and the seas upon the other. This is a very wise pre- 
caution in the case of boats which are always made to 
take the shore broadside on. The first sea that strikes 
the boat either shoots the passenger on to the dry 
sand, or puts him where he can easily be caught by 
the natives on the beach, but the Massullah boat her- 
self gets a terrible banging before the crew can haul 
her out of reach of the seas. 

Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm- 
tree, but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly, steam- 
ing between light-houses, guard-ships, and buoys, but 
not catching a glimpse of the low land of the Sundera- 
bunds till we had been many hours in "the river." 
After lying right off the tiger-infested island of Saugur, 
we started on our run up to Calcutta before the sun 
was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene was 
English; there was nothing tropical about it except 
the mist upon the land ; and low villas and distant 
factory -chimneys reminded one of the Thames between 
Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, 
where large ships anchor before they sail, we had a 
long, low building on our right, gaudy and archi- 
tecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost im- 
posing : it was the palace of the dethroned King of 
Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried on deeds 
become impossible in Lucknow. Such has been the 
extravagance of the King that the government of India 
has lately interfered, and appointed a commission to 
pay his debts, and deduct them from his income of 
.£120,000 a year; for we pay into the privy purse of 
the dethroned Vizier of Oude exactly twice the yearly 
sum that we set aside for that of Queen Victoria. 



MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 163 

Whatever income is allowed to native princes, they 
alwa3'8 spend the double. The experience of the 
Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this 
respect. liemoved from that slight restraint upon 
expenditure which the fear of bankruptcy or revolution 
forces upon reigning kings, native princes supported. 
by European governments run recklessly into debt. 
The commission which was sitting upon the debts of 
the King of Oude while I was in Calcutta warned him 
that, if he oftended a second time, government would 
for the future spend his income for him. It is not the 
King's extravagance alone, however, that is complained, 
of. Always notorious for debauchery, he has how 
become infamous for his vices. One of his wives was 
arrested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls 
for the harem, but the King himself escaped. For 
nine years he has never left his palace, yet he spends, 
we are told, from ,£200,000 to £250,000 a year. 

In his extravagance and immorality the King of 
Oude does not stand alone in Calcutta. His mode of 
life is imitated by the wealthy natives; his vices are 
mimicked by every young Bengalee baboo. It is a 
question whether we are not responsible for the tone 
which has been taken by "civilization" in Calcutta. 
The old philosophy has gone, and left nothing in its 
place; we have by moral force destroyed the old reli- 
gions in Calcutta, but we have set up no new. Whether 
the character of our Indian government, at once level- 
ing and paternal, has not much to do with the spread 
of careless sensuality is a question before answering 
which it would be well to look to France, where a 
similar government has for sixteen years prevailed. 
In Paris, at least, democratic despotism is fast de- 
grading the French citizen to the moral level of the 
Bengalee baboo. 



164 GREATER BRITAIN. 

The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view 
of the Government House from the Park Reserve — a 
miniature Sahara since its trees were destroyed by the 
great cyclone. The Viceroy's dwelling, though crushed 
by groups of lions and unicorns of gigantic stature and 
astonishing design, is an imposing building; but it is 
the only palace in the " city of palaces" — a name which 
must have been given to the pestiferous city by some 
one who had never seen any other towns but Liverpool 
and London. The true city of palaces is Lucknow. 

In Calcutta, I first became acquainted with that un- 
bounded hospitality of the great mercantile houses in 
the East of which I have since acquired many pleasing 
remembrances. The luxury of " the firm" impresses 
the English traveler ; the huge house is kept as a 
hotel; every one is welcome to dinner, breakfast, and 
bed in the veranda, or iu a room, if he can sleep 
under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two and 
sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always 
without notice to the butlers or the cooks, but every 
one is welcome, down to the friend of a friend's friend ; 
and junior clerks will write letters of introduction to 
members of the firm, which secure the bearer a most 
hospitable welcome from the other clerks, even w^hen 
all the partners are away. "If Brown is not there, 
Smith will be, and if he's away, why then Johnson 
will put you up," is the form of invitation to the hos- 
pitalities of an Eastern firm. The finest of fruits are 
on table between five and six, and tea and iced drinks 
are ready at all times, from dawn to breakfast — a cere- 
mony which takes place at ten. To the regular meals 
you come in or not as you please, and no one trained in 
Calcutta or Bombay can conceive ofiense being taken by 
a host at his guest accepting, without consulting him, 
invitations to dine out in the city, or to spend some 



MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 165 

(3aj9 at a villa in its outskirts. Servants are in the 
corridors by day and night at the call of guests, and 
your entertainers tell you that, although they have not 
time to go about with you, servants will always be 
read}^ to drive you at sunset to the band-stand in the 
carriage of some member of the firm. 

The population of Calcutta is as motley as that of 
Galle, though the constituents are not the same. 
Greeks, Armenians, and Burmese, besides many Eura- 
sians, or English-speaking half-castes, mingle with the 
mass of Indian Mohammedans and Hindoos. The hot 
weather having suddenlj^ set m, the Calcutta officials, 
happier than the merchants — who, however, care little 
about heat when trade is good — were starting for 
Simla in a body, "just as they were warming to their 
work,'' as the Calcutta people say, and, finding that 
there was nothing to be done in the stifling city, I, too, 
determined to set ofir'. 

The heat was great at night, and the noisy native 
crows and wdiistling kites held durbars inside my 
window in the only cool hour of the twenty-four — • 
namely, that which begins at dawn — and thus hast- 
ened my departure from Calcutta by preventing me 
from taking rest while in it. Hearing that at Patna 
there was nothing to be seen or learnt, I traveled from 
Calcutta to Benares — 500 miles — in the same train 
and railway carriage. Our tiret long stoppage was at 
Chandernagore, but, as the native baggage-coolies', or 
porters, howl the station names in their own fashion, I 
hardly recognized the city in the melancholy moan of 
"Orn-dorn-orn-gorne," which welcomed the train, and 
it was not till I saw a French infantry uniform upon 
the platform that I remembered that Chandernagoi'T?, 
a village belonging to the French, lies hard by Cal- 
cutta, to which city it was once a dangerous rival. It 



166 GREATER BRITAIN. 

is said that the French retain their Indian depend- 
encies, instead of selling them to us as did the Dutch, 
in order that they may ever bear in mind the fact that 
we once conquered them in India; but it would be hard 
to find any real ground for their retention, unless they 
are held as centers for the Catholic missions. We will 
not even permit them to be made smuggling depots, 
for which purpose they would be excellently adapted. 
The whole of the possessions in India of the French 
amount together to only twenty-six leagues square. 
Even Pondicherry, the largest and only French Indian 
dependency of which the name is often heard in 
Europe, is cut into several portions by strips of British 
territory, and the whole of the French-Indian depend- 
encies are mere specks of land isolated in our vast 
territories. The officer who was lounging in the 
station was a native; indeed, in the territory of Chan- 
dernagore there are but 230 Europeans, and but 1500 
in all French India. He made up to my compartment 
as though he would have got in, which I wished that 
he would have done, as natives in the French service 
all speak French, but, seeing a European, he edged 
awa}^ to a dark uncomfortable compartment. This 
action was, I fear, a piece of silent testimony to the 
prejudice which makes our people in India almost in- 
variably refuse to travel with a native, whatever may 
be his rank. 

As we passed through Burdwan and Rajmahal, 
where the East Indian Railway taps the Ganges, the 
station scenes became more and more interesting. 
We associate with the word "railway" ideas that 
are peculiarly English: — shareholders and directors, 
guards in blue, policemen in dark green, and porters 
in brown corduroy; no English institution, however, 
assumes more readily an Oriental dress. Station- 



MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 167 

masters and sparrows alone are English; everything 
else on a Bengal railway is purely Eastern. Sikh 
irregulars jostle begging fakeers in the stations; 
palkees and doolies — palankeens and sedans, as we 
should call them — wait at the back doors; ticket- 
clerks smoke water-pipes; an ibis drinks at the engine- 
tank; a sacred cow looks over the fence, and a tame 
elephant reaches up with his trunk at the telegraph- 
wire, on which sits a hoopoe, while an Indian vulture 
crowns the post. 

"When we came opposite to the Monghyr Hills, the 
only natural objects which for 1600 miles break the 
level of the great plain of Hindostan, people of the 
central tribes, small-headed and savage-looking, were 
mingled with the Hindoos at the stations. In black- 
ness there was not much difference between tho 
races, for low-caste Bengalees are as black as Guinea 
negroes. 

As the day grew hot, a water-carrier with a well- 
filled skin upon his back appeared at every station, 
and came running to the native cars in answer to the 
universal long-drawn shout of ^'Ah! ah! Bheestie — e!" 

The first view^ of the Ganges calls up no enthusiasm. 
The Thames below Gravesend half. dried up would be 
not unlike it; indeed, the river itself is as ugly as 
the Mississippi or Missouri, while its banks are more 
hideous by far than theirs. Beyond Patna, the plains, 
too, become 'as monotonous as the river, — flat, dusty, 
and treeless, they are in no way tropical in their char- 
acter ; they lie, indeed, wholly outside the tropics. I 
afterward found that a man may cross India from the 
Irawaddy to the Indus, and see no tropical scenery, no 
tropical cultivation. The aspect of the Ganges valley 
is that of Cambridgeshire, or of parts of Lincoln seen 
after harvest time, and with flocks of strange and bril- 



168 GREATER BRITAIN. 

liant birds and an occasional jackal thrown in. The 
sun is hot — not, indeed, much hotter than in Aus- 
tralia, but the heat is of a different kind from that 
encountered by the English in Ceylon or the West 
Indies. From a military point of view, the plains may 
be described as a parade-ground continued to infinity; 
and this explains the success of our small forces against 
the rebels in 1857, our cavahy and artillery having in 
all cases swept their infantry from these levels with 
the utmost ease. 

A view over the plains by daylight is one which in 
former times some old Indians can never have enjoyed. 
Many a lady in the daj-s of palki-dawk has passed a 
life in the Deccan table-land without ever seeing a 
mountain, or knowing she was on the top of one. 
Carried up and down the ghauts at night, it was only 
by the tilting of her palki that she could detect the 
rise or fall, for day traveling for ladies was almost 
unknown in India before it was introduced with the 
railways. 

At Patna, the station was filled with crowds of rail- 
way coolies, or navvies, as we should say, who, with 
their tools and baggage, were camped out upon the 
platform, smoking peacefully. I afterward found that 
natives have little idea of time-tables and departure 
hours. When they want to go ten miles by railway, 
they walk straight down to the nearest station, and 
there smoke their hookahs till the train arrives — at the 
end of twenty- four hours or ten minutes, as the case 
may be. There is but one step that the more ignorant 
among the natives are in a hurry to take, and that is 
to buy their tickets. They are no sooner come to the 
terminus than with one accord they rush at the native 
ticket-clerk, ^^elling the name of the station to which 
they wish to go. In vain he declares that, the train 



MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 169 

not being due for ten or fifteen hours, there is plenty 
of time for the purchase. Open-mouthed, and wrought 
up almost to madness, the passengers dance round him, 
screaming " Burdwan !" or " Serampoor !" or whatever 
the name may be, till at last he surrenders at discre- 
tion. There is often no room for all who wish to go; 
indeed, the worst point about the management of the 
railways lies in the defective accommodation for the 
native passengers, and their treatment by the English 
station-masters is not always good: I saw them on 
many occasions terribly kicked and cuffed; but Indian 
station-masters are not very highly paid, and are too 
often men who cannot resist the temptations to vio- 
lence which despotic power throws in their way. They 
might ask with the Missourian in the United States 
army when he was accused of drunkenness, "Whether 
Uncle Sam expected to get all the cardinal virtues for 
fifteen dollars a month?" • 

ijThe Indian railways are all made and worked by 
companies; but as the government guarantees the 
I interest of five per cent., which only the East Indian, 
or Calcutta and Delhi, line can pay, it interferes much 
in the management. The telegraph is both made and 
worked by government; and the reason why the rail- 
ways were not put upon the same footing is that the 
government of India was doubtful as to the wisdom 
of borrowing directly the vast sum required, and 
doubtful also of the possibility of borrowing it with- 
out diminishing its credit. 

The most marked among the effects of railways upon 
the state of India are, as a moral change, the weaken- 
ing of caste ties — as a physical, the destruction of the 
Indian forests. It is found that if a rich native dis- 
covers that he can, by losing caste in touching his infe- 
riors, travel a certain distance in a comfortable second- 

VOL. II. 15 



170 GEE ATE R BRITAIN. 

class carriage for ten rupees, while a first-class ticket 
costs him twenty, he will often risk his caste to save 
his pound ; still, caste yields but slowly to railways 
and the telegraph. It is but a very few years since one 
of my friends received a thousand rupees for pleading 
in a case which turned on the question whether the 
paint-?pot on Krishna's nose, which is also a caste sign, 
should be drawn as a plain horizontal crescent, or with 
a pendant from the center. It is only a year since, in 
Orissa, it was seen that Hindoo peasants preferred can- 
nibalism, or death by starvation, to defilement by eating 
their bullocks. 

As for the forests, their destruction has already in 
many places changed a somewhat moist climate to one 
of excessive drought, and planting is now taking place 
with a view both to supplying the railway engines 
and bringing back the rains. On the East Indian line, 
I found that they burnt mixed coal and wood, but the 
Indian coal is scarce and bad, and lies entirely in shal- 
low *' pockets." 

The train reached Mogul-Serai, the junction for 
Benares, at midnight of the day following that on 
which it left Calcutta, and, changing my carriage at 
once, I asked how long it would be before we started, 
to which the answer was, "half an hour;" so I went 
to sleep. Immediately, as it seemed, I was awakened 
by whispering, and, turning, saw a crowd of boys and 
baggage-coolies at the carriage-door. When I tried 
to discover what they wanted, my Hindostanee broke 
down, and it was some time before I found that I had 
slept through the short journey from Mogul-Serai, and 
had dozed on in the station till the lights had been put 
out, before the coolies woke me. Crossing the Ganges 
by the bridge of boats, I found myself in Benares, the 
ancient Varanasi, and sacred capital of the Hindoos. 



BENARES. 171 



CHAPTER lY. 

BENARES. 

In the comparative cool of early morning, I sallied 
out on a stroll through the outskirts of Benares. Thou- 
sands of women were stepping gracefully along the 
crowded roads, bearing on their heads the water-jars, 
while at every few paces there was a well, at which 
hundreds were waiting along with the bheesties their 
turn for lowering their bright gleaming copper cups 
to the well-water to till their skius or vases. All were 
keeping up a continual chatter, w^omen with women, 
men with men : all the tongues wdre running cease- 
lessly. It is astonishing to see the indignation that a 
trilling mishap creates — such gesticulation, such shout- 
ing, and loud talk, you would think that murder at 
least was in question. The world cannot show the 
Hindoo's equal as a babbler; the women talk while 
they grind corn, the men while they smoke their water- 
pipes; your true Hindoo is never quiet; when not talk 
ing, he is playing on his tomtom. 

The Doorgha Khond, the famed Temple of the Sacred 
Monkeys, I found thronged with worshipers, and gar- 
landed in every part with roses: it overhangs one of 
the best holy tanks in India, but has not much beauty 
or grandeur, and is chiefly remarkable for the swarms 
of huge, fat-paunched, yellow-bearded, holy monkeys, 
whose outposts hold one quarter of the city, and whose 
main body forms a living roof to the temple. A sin- 
gular contrast to the Doorgha Khond was the Queen's 



172 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

College for naliva students, built in a mixture of Tudor 
and Hindoo architecture. The view from the roof is 
noticeable, depending as it does for its beauty on the 
mingling of the rich green of the timber with the gay 
colors of the painted native huts. Over the trees are 
seen the minarets at the river-side, and an unwonted 
life was given to the view by the smoke and flames 
that were rising from two burning huts, in widely- 
separated districts of the native town. It is said that 
the natives, whenever they quarrel with their neigh^' 
bors, always take the first opportunity of tiring their 
huts; but in truth the huts in the hot weather almost 
fire themselves, so inflammable are their roofs and sides. 
When the sun had declined sufficiently to admit of 
another excursion, I started from my bungalow, and, 
passing through the elephant-corral, went down with 
a guide to the ghauts, the observatory of Jai Singh, 
and the Golden Temple. From the minarets of the 
mosque of Aurungzebe I had a lovely sunset view of 
the ghauts, the city, and the Ganges; but the real 
sight of Benares, after all, lies in a walk through the 
tortuous passages that do duty for streets. N"o carriages 
<jan pass them, they are so narrow. You walk pre- 
ceded by 3^our guide, who warns the people, that they 
may stand aside and not be defiled by your touch, for 
that is the real secret of the apparent respect paid to 
you in Benares; but the sacred cows are so numerous 
and so obstinate that you cannot avoid sometimes 
jostling them. The scene in the passages is the most 
Indian in India. The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo 
princes spending a week in purification at the holy 
place, the frescoed fronts of the shops and houses, the 
deafening beating of the tomtoms, and, above all, the 
smoke and sickening smell from the " burning ghauts" 
that meets you, mingled with a sweeter smell of burn- 



BENARES. 173 

ing spices, as you work your way througli the vast 
crowds of pilgrims who are pouring up from the river's 
bank — all alike are strange to the English traveler, 
and fill his mind with that indescribable awe which 
everywhere accompanies the sight of scenes and cere- 
monies that we do not understand. When once you 
are on the Ganges bank itself, the scene is wilder still : 
— a river front of some three miles, faced with lofty 
ghauts, or flights of river stairs, over which rise, pile 
above pile, in sublime confusion, lofty palaces with oriel 
windows hanging over the sacred stream ; observato- 
ries with giant sun-dials, gilt domes {golden., the story 
runs), and silver minarets. On the ghauts, rows of 
fires, each with a smouldering body ; on the river, boat- 
loads of pilgrims, and fakeers praying while they float; 
under the houses, lines of prostrate bodies — those of 
the sick — brought to the sacred Ganges to die — or, say 
our government spies, to be murdered by suflbcation 
with sacred mud; while prowling about are the wolf- 
like fanatics who feed on putrid flesh. The whole is 
lit by a sickly sun fitfully glaring through the smoke, 
while the Ganges stream is half obscured by the river 
fog and reek of the hot earth. 

The lofty pavilions that crown the river front are 
ornamented with paintings of every beast that walks 
and bird that flies, with monsters, too — pink and green 
and spotted — with gritiins, dragons, and elephant- 
headed gods embracing dancing-girls. Here and there 
are representations of red-coated soldiers — English, it 
would seem, for they have white faces, but so, the 
Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies, w^ho are 
certainly not British. The Benares taste for painting 
leads to the decoration with pink and yellow spots of 
the very cows. The tiger is the commonest of all the 
figures on the walls — indeed, the explanation that the 

15* 



174 GREATER BRITAIN, 

representations are allegorical, or that gods are pictured 
in tiger shape, has not removed from my mind the 
belief that the tiger must have been worshiped in 
India at some early date. All Easterns are incUned 
to vs^orship the beasts that eat them : the Javanese light 
floating sacriflces to their river crocodiles ; the IScindees 
at Kurrachee venerate the sacred muggur, or man-eat- 
ing alligator; the hill-tribes pray to snakes; indeed, 
to a new-comer, all Indian religion has the air of devil- 
worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some 
shape : the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are 
propitiated by infernal music, they are often worshiped 
w'ith obscene and hideous rites. There is even some- 
thing cruel in the monotonous roar of the great tom- 
toms; the sound seems to connect itself with widow- 
burning, with child-murder, with Juggernauth pro- 
cessions. Since the earliest known times, the tomtom 
has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics; 
its booming is bound up with the thousand barbarisms 
of talse relisrion. If the scene on the Benares 2:haut3 
is full of horrors, we must not forget that Ilindooism 
is a creed of fear and horror, not of love. 

The government of India has lately instituted an in- 
quiry into the alleged abuses of the custom of taking 
eick Hindoos to the Ganges-side to die, with a view to 
regulating or suppressing the practice which prevails 
in the river-side portion of Lower Bengal. At Ben- 
ares, Bengal people are still taken to the river-side, 
but not so other natives, as Hindoos dying anywhere 
in the sacred city have all the blessings which the most 
holy death can possibly secure ; the Benares Shastra, 
moreover, forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases 
of it in the city, although I had seen many near Cal- 
cutta. IS'ot only are aged people brought from their 
sick-rooms, laid in the burning sun, and half suffocated 



BENARES 175 

with the Gangea water poured down their throats, 
but, owing to the ridicule which follows if they re- 
cover, or the selfishness of their relatives, the water is 
often muddier than it need be : hence the phrase 
"ghaut niurder," by which this custom is generally 
known. Similar customs are not unheard of in other 
parts of India, and even in Polynesia and J^orth 
America. The Veddahs, or black aborigines of Cey- 
lon, were, up to very lately, in the habit of carrying 
their dying parents or children into the jungle, and, 
having placed a chatty of water and some rice by their 
side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts. 
Under pressure from our officials, they are believed to 
have ceased to act thus, but they continue, we are told, 
to throw their dead to the leopards and crocodiles. 
The Maories, too, have a way of taking out to die alone 
those whom their seers have pronounced doomed men, 
but it is probable that, among the rude races, the cus- 
tom which seems to be a relic of human sacrifice has 
not been so grossly abused as it has been by the Bengal 
Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of 
many similar barbarities that disgrace the religion of 
the Hindoos, but it is fast sharing the fate of suttee 
and infanticide. 

As I returned through the bazaar, I met many most 
unholy-looking visitors to the sacred town. Fierce 
Rajpoots, with enormous turbans ornamented with zig- 
zag stripes : Bengal bankers, in large purple turbans, 
curling their long white mustaches, and bearing their 
critical noses high aloft as they daintily picked their 
way over the garbage of the streets ; and savage re- 
tainers of the rajahs staying for a season at their city 
palaces, were to the traveler's eye no very devout 
pilgrims. In truth, the immoralities of the " holy 
city" are as great as its religious virtues, and it is the 



176 GREATER BRITAIN. 

chosen ground of the loose characters as well as of the 
pilgrims of the Hindoo world. 

In the whole of the great throng in the bazaar, 
hardly the slightest trace of European dressing was to 
be perceived : the varnished boots of the wealthier 
Hindoos alone bore witness to the existence of English 
trade — a singular piece of testimony, this, to the essen- 
tial conservatism of the Oriental mind. With any 
quantity of old army clothing to be got for the asking, 
you never see a rag of it on a native back — not even 
on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket to 
an out-door servant, he will cut it into strips and wear 
them as a puggree round his head; but this is about the 
only thing he will accept, unless to sell it in the bazaar. 

As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains 
of laden camels that were winding slowly through the 
tortuous streets, I saw a European soldier cheapening 
a bracelet with a native jeweler. He was the lirst topee 
w;a^^/i (" hat- fellow," or "European") that I had seen 
in Benares City. Calcutta is the only town in iNTorth- 
ern India in which you meet Europeans in your walks 
or rides, and, even there, there is but one European to 
every sixty natives. In all India, there are, including 
troops, children, and officials of all kinds, far less than 
as many thousands of Europeans as there are millions 
of natives. 

The evenins: after that on which I visited the native 
town, I saw in Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the 
India hated and dreaded by our troops — by day a 
blazing deadly heat and sun, at night a still more 
deadly fog — a hot white fog, into which the sun dis- 
appears half an hour before his time for setting, 
and out of which he shoots soon after seven in the 
morning, to blaze and kill again — a pestiferous fever- 
breeding ground-fog, out of which stand the tops of 



BENARES. 177 

the palms, though their stems are invisible in the 
steam. Compared with our English summer climate, 
it seems the atmosphere of another planet. 

Among the men in the cantonments, T found much 
of that demoralization that heat everywhere produces 
among Englishmen. The newly-arrived soldiers appear 
to pass their days in alternate trials of hard drinking 
and of total abstinence, and are continually in a state 
of nervous fright, which in time must wear them out 
and make them an easy prey to fever. The officers 
who are fresh from England often behave in much the 
same manner as the men, though with them " belatee 
pawnee" takes the place of plain water with the 
brandy. "Belatee pawnee" means, being translated, 
"English water," but, when interpreted, it means 
" soda-water" — the natives once believing that this 
was English river-water, bottled and brought to India 
by us as they carry Ganges water to the remotest parts. 
The superstition is now at an end, owing to the fact 
that natives are themselves largely employed in the 
making of soda-water, which is cheaper in India than 
it is at home ; but the name remains. 

Our men kill themselves with beer, with brandy and 
soda-water, and with careless inattention to night chills, 
and then blame the poor climate for their fevers, or 
die cursing " India." Of course, long residence in a 
climate winterless and always hot at mid-day produces 
or intensifies certain diseases; but brandy and soda- 
water produces more, and intensifies all. They say it 
is '' soda-and-brandy" the first month, and then " brandy- 
and-soda," but that men finally take to putting in the 
soda-water first, and then somehow the brandy always 
kills them. If a man wears a flannel belt and thick 
clothes when he travels by night, and drinks hot tea, 
he need not fear India. 



178 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Ill all ways, Benares is the type of India; in the Se- 
crole cantonments, you have the English in India, in- 
telligent enough, but careless, and more English than 
they are at home, with garrison chaplains, picnics, balls, 
and champagne suppers ; hard by, in the native town, 
the lierce side of Hindooism, and streets for an English- 
man to show himself in which ten years as^o w^as almost 
certain death. Benares is the center of all the political 
intrigues of India; but the great mutiny itself was 
hatched there without beins^ heard of at Secrole. Ex- 
cept that our policemen now perambulate the town, 
change in Benares there has been none. Were mis- 
sionaries to appear openly in its streets, their fate would 
still very possibly be the same as that which in this 
cit}^ befell St. Thomas. 



CHAPTER V. 

CASTE. 



One of the greatest difficulties with which the Brit- 
ish have to contend in Hindostau is how to discover 
the tendencies, how to follow the changes, of native 
opinion. Your Hindoo is so complaisant a companion, 
that, whether he is your servant at threepence a day, 
or the ruler of the State in which you dwell, he is per- 
petually striving to make his opinions the reflex of 
your own. You are engaged in a continual strusrgle 
to prevent your views from being seen, in order that 
you may get at his: in this you always fail : a slight 



CASTE. 179 

hint is enough for a Hindoo, and, if he cannot find even 
that much of suggestion in your words, he conlines 
himself to comn^on place. We should see in this, not 
so much one of the forms assumed hy the cringing 
slavishness born of centuries of subjection, not so much 
an example of Oriental cunning, as of the polish of 
Eastern manners. Even in our rude country it is 
hardly courteous, whatever your opinions, flatly to con- 
tradict the man with whom you happen to be talking; 
with the Hindoo, it is the height of ill breeding so 
much as to differ from him. The results of the prac- 
tice are deploral)le ; our utter ignorance of the secret 
history of the rebellion of 1857 is an example of its 
working, for there must have been a time, before discon- 
tent ripened into conspiracy, when we might have been 
advised and warned. The native newspapers are worse 
than useless to us ; accepted as exponents of Hindoo 
views by those who know no better, and founded mostly 
by British capital, they are at once incapable of direct- 
ing and of acting as indexes to native opinion, and ex- 
press only the sentiments of half a dozen small mer- 
chants at the presidency towns, who give the tone to 
some two or three papers, which are copied and fol- 
lowed by the remainder. 

The result of this difiiculty in discovering native 
opinion is that our officers, however careful, however 
considerate in their bearing toward the natives, daily 
wound the feelings of the people who are under their 
care by acts which, though done in a praiseworthy 
spirit, appear to the natives deeds of gross stupidity or 
of outrageous despotism. It is hopeless to attempt to 
conciliate, it is impossible bo much as to govern unless 
by main force continually displayed, an Eastern people 
in whose religious thought we are not deeply learned. 

Not only are we unacquainted with the feelings of the 



180 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

people, but we are lamentably ignorant of the simplest 
facts about their religions, their wealth, and their oc- 
cupations, for no census of all India has yet been taken. 
A complete census had, indeed, been taken, not long 
before my visit, in Central India, and another in the 
Northwest Provinces, but none in Madras, Bombay, 
the Punjaub, or Bengal. The difficulties in the way 
of the officials who carried through the arrangements 
for the two that had been taken were singular)}^ great. 
In the Central Provinces, the census-papers had to be 
prepared in five languages; both here and in the North- 
west, the purely scientific nature of the inquiry had to 
be brought home to the minds of the people. In Cen- 
tral India the hill-tribes believed that our object in the 
census was to pave the way for the collection of the un- 
married girls as companions for our wifeless soldiers, 
so all began marrying forthwith. In the Northwest, 
the natives took it into their heads that our object was 
to see how many able-bodied men would be available 
for a war against Russia, and to collect a poll-tax to 
pay for the expedition. The numerous tribes that are 
habitually guilty of infanticide threw every difficulty 
in the way; Europeans disliked the whole afiair, on ac- 
count of the insult offisred to their dignity in ranking 
them along with natives. It must be admitted, indeed, 
that the provisions for recording caste distinctions gave 
an odd shape to the census-papers left at the houses at 
Secrole, in which European officers were asked to state 
their " caste or tribe." The census of the Central Prov- 
inces was imperfect enough, but that of the North- 
west was the second that had been taken theie, and 
showed signs of scientific arrangement and great 
care. 

The Northwest Provinces include the great towns 
of Benares, Agra, awd Allahabad, and the census fell 



CASTE. 181 

into my hands at Benares itself, at the Sanscrit Col- 
lege. It was a strange production, and seemed to have 
brought together a mass of information respecting 
castes and creeds which was new even to those who 
had lived long in the Northwest Provinces. All call- 
ings in India being hereditary, there were entries re- 
cording the presence in certain towns of "hereditary 
clerks who pray to their inkhorns," "hereditary beg- 
gars," "hereditary planters of slips or cuttings," "he- 
reditary grave-diggers," "hereditary hermits," and 
"hereditary hangmen," for in India a hangmanship 
descends with as much regularity as a crown. In the 
single district of the Dehra Valley, there are 1500 
" hereditary tomtom men" — drummers at the festivals; 
231 Brahmins of Bijnour returned themselves as having 
for profession " the receipt of presents to avert the in- 
fluence of evil stars." In Bijnour, there are also fifteen 
people of a caste which professes "the pleasiug of peo- 
ple by assuming disguises," while at Benares there is 
a whole caste — the Bhats — whose hereditary occupa- 
tion is to "satirize the enemies of the rich, and to 
praise their friends." In the JS^orthwest Provinces, 
there are 572 distinct castes in all. 

The accounts which some castes gave of their origin 
read strangely in a solemn governmental document: 
the members of one caste described themselves as 
"descended from Maicasur, a demon;" but some of 
the records are less legendary and more historic. One 
caste in the Dehra Valley sent in a note that they 
came in 1000 a.d. from the Deccan ; another, that 
they emigrated from Arabia 500 years ago. The Gour 
Brahmins claim to have been in the district of Moozuf- 
fernuggur for 5000 years. 

Under the title of " occupations," the heads of fami- 
lies alone were given, and not the number of those 

VOL. II, IC 



182 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

dependent on them, whence it comes that in the wh( le 4 
province only "11,000 tomtom players" were set down. 
The habits and tastes of the people are easily seen 
in the entries: "3600 firework manufacturers," "45 
makers of crowns for idols," "4353 gold-bangle mak- 
ers," <' 29,136 glass-bangle makers," "1123 astrolo- 
gers." There are also 145 "ear- cleaners," besides 
"kite -makers," "ear -piercers," "pedigree -makers," 
"makers of caste-marks," "cow-dung sellers," and 
*' hereditary painters of horses with spots." There was 
no backwardness in the followers of maligned pur- 
suits: 974 people in Allahabad described themselves 
as "low blackguards," 35 as "men who beg with 
threats of violence," 25 as " hereditary robbers," 
479,015 as "beggars," 29 as ^'howlers at funerals," 
226 as " flatterers for gain ;" "vagabonds," "charm- 
ers," "informers" were all set down, and 1100 re- 
turned themselves as "hereditary bufibons," while 
2000 styled themselves "conjurers," 4000 " acrobats," 
and 6372 "poets." In one district alone, there were 
777 " soothsa3^ers and astrologers" by profession. 

It is worthy of notice that, although there are in the 
iN'orthwest Provinces half a million of beggars in a 
population of thirty millions, they seem never to beg 
of Europeans — at least, I was not once asked for alms 
daring my stay in India. If the smallest service be 
performed, there comes a howl of ''O Bauks-heece!" 
from all quarters^ but at other times natives seem 
afraid to beg of Englishmen. 

The number of fakeers, soothsayers, charmers, and 
other "religious" vagabonds is enormous, but the 
dense ignorance of the people renders them a prey to 
witchcraft, evil-eye, devil-inliuence, and all such folly. 
In Central India, there are whole districts which are 
looked upon as witch-tracts or haunted places, and 



CASTE. 183 

which are never approached by man, but set aside as 
homes for devils. A gentleman who was lately en- 
gaged there on the railroad survey found that night 
after nia:ht his men were friechtened out of their wits 
by "fire-liends," or blazing demons. He insisted that 
they should take him to the spot where these strange 
eights were seen, and to his amazement he, too, saw 
the iire-devil; at least, he saw a blaze of light moving 
slowly through the jungle. Gathering himself up for 
a chase, he rushed at the devil with a club, when the 
light suddenly disappeared, and instantly shone out 
from another spot, a hundred yards from the former 
place. Seeing that there was some trickery at w^ork, 
he hid himself, and after some hours caught his devil, 
who, to escape from a sound drubbing, gave an expla- 
nation of the whole affair. The man said that the 
natives of the surveyor's party had stolen his mangoes 
for several nights, but that at last he had hit on a 
plan for frightening them away. lie and his sons 
went out at dark with pots of blazing oil upon their 
heads, and, when approached by thieves, the leading 
one put a cover on his pot, and became invisible, while 
the second uncovered his. The surveying party got 
the drubbing, and the devil escaped scot-free; but the 
surveyor, with short-sighted wisdom, told his men, 
who had not seen him catch the fire-bearer, that he 
had had the honor of an interview with the devil 
himself, who had joyfully informed him of the thefts 
committed by the men. The surveyor did not admit 
that he was from this time forward worshiped by his 
party, but it is not unlikel}^ that such was the case. 
One of the hill- tribes of Madras worships Colonel 
Palmer, a British ofiicer who died some seventy years 
ago, just as Drake was worshiped in America, and 
Captain Cook in Hawaii. It was one of these tribes 



184 Q BEATER BRITAIN. 

that invented the well-known worshiping machine, or 
" praying- wheel." 

The hill-tribes are less refined, but hardly more 
io^norant in their fanaticism than are the Hindoos. At 
Bombay, upon the beach where the dead are buried, 
or rather tossed to the wild beasts, I saw a filthy and 
holy Hindoo saint, whose claim to veneration consists 
in his having spent the whole of the days and portions 
of the nights for twenty years in a stone box in which 
he can neither stand, nor lie, nor sit, nor sleep. These 
saintly fakeers have still much influence with the Hin- 
doo mass, but in old times their power and their inso- 
lence were alike unbounded. Agra itself was founded 
to please one of them. The great Emperor Akbar, 
who, although a lax Mohammedan, was in no sense a 
Hindoo, kept nevertheless a Hindoo saint for political 
purposes, and gave him the foremost position in his 
train. When the emperor was beginning to fortify 
Futtehpore Sikri, where he lived, the saint sent for 
him, and said that the work must be stopped, as the 
noise disturbed him at his prayers. The emperor 
offered him new rooms away from the site of the 
proposed walls, but the saint replied that, whether 
Akbar went on with his works or no, he should leave 
Futtehpore. To pacify him, Akbar founded Agra, and 
dismantled Futtehpore Sikri. 

From the census it appears that there are, in the 
Northwest Provinces, no less than twenty-two news- 
papers under government inspection, of which five are 
published at Agra. The circulation of these papers 
is extremely small, and as the government itself takes 
8500 of the 12,000 copies which they issue, its hold 
over them, without exertion of force, is great. Of the 
other 8500, 8000 go to native and 500 to European 
subscribers. All the native papers are skillful at cater- 



CASTE. 185 

ing for their double public, but those which are printed 
half in a native tongue and half in English stand in 
the first rank for unscrupulousness. One of these 
papers gave, while I was in India, some French speech 
in abuse of the Enghsh. This was headed on the 
English side, '^Interesting Account of the English," but 
on the native side, '^JExcellent Account of the English." 
The " English correspondence" and English news of 
these native papers are so absurdly concocted by the 
editors out of their own brains that it is a question 
whether it would not be advisable to send them weekly 
a column of European news, and even to withhold 
government patronage from them unless they gave it 
room, leaving them to qualify and explain the facts ag 
best they could. Their favorite statements are that 
Russia is going to invade India forthwith, that the 
Queen has become a Catholic or a Mohammedan, and 
that the whole population of India is to be converted 
to Christianity by force. The external appearance of 
the native papers is sometimes as comical as their 
matter. The Umritsur Commercial Advertiser, of which 
nothing is English but the title, gives, for instance, 
the time-tables of the Punjaub Railway on its back 
sheet. The page, which is a mere maze of dots and 
crooked lines, has at the top a cut of a railwa}^ train, 
in which guards apparently cocked-hatted, but proba- 
bly meant to be wearing pith helmets, are represented 
sitting on the top of each carriage, with their legs dan- 
gling down in front of the windows. 

i^either Christianity nor native reformed religions 
make much show in the ITorthwestern census. The 
Christians are strongest in the South of India, the 
Hindoo reformers in the Punjaub. The Sikhs them- 
selves, and the Kookhas, Nirunkarees, Goolab Dasseas, 
Naukeeka-punth, and many other Punjaubee sects, all 

16* 



186 OEEATER BRITAIN. 

Bhow mo^e or less hostility to caste; but in the North- 
west Provinces caste distinctions flourish, although in 
reality they have no doubt lost strength. The high- 
caste men are beginning to tind their caste a drawback 
to their success in life, and are given to concealing it. 
Just as with ourselves kings go incognito when they 
travel for pleasure, so the Bengal sepoy hides his Brah- 
niinical string under his cloth, in order that he may 
be sent on foreign service without its being known 
that by crossing the seas he will lose caste. 

Judging by the unanimous opinion of the native 
press on the doings of the Maharajahs of Bombay, 
and on the licentiousness of the Koolin Brahmins, 
man}' of our civilians have come to think that Hindoo- 
ism in its present shape has lost the support of a large 
number of the more intelligent Hindoos; but there is 
little reason to believe that this is the case. In Cal- 
cutta, the Church of Hindoo Deists is gaining ground, 
and one of their leaders is said to have met with some 
successes during a recent expedition to the Northwest, 
but of this there is no proof. The little regard that 
many high-caste natives show for caste except as a 
matter of talk merely means that caste is less an atiair 
of religion than of custom, but that it is a matter of 
custom does not show that its force is slight: on the 
contrarv, custom is the lord of India. 

The success of Mohammedanism in India should show 
that caste has never been strong except so far as caste 
is custom. It is true that the peasants in Orissa starved 
by the side of the sacred cows, but this was custom 
too: any one man killing the cow would have been at 
once killed b}^ his also starving neighbors for breaking 
custom ; but once change the custom by force, and 
there is no tendency to return to the former state of 
things. The Portuguese and the Mohammedans alike 



CASTE. 187 

made converts by compulsion, yet when the pressure 
was removed there was no return to the earlier faith. 
Of the nature of caste we had an excellent example in 
the behavior of the troopers of a Bengal cavalry regi- 
ment three weeks before the outbreak of the mutiny 
of 1857, when they said that for their part they knew 
that their cartridges were not greased with the fat of 
cows, but that, as they looked as though they were, it 
came to the same thing, for they should lose caste if 
their friends saw them touch the cartridges in question. 

It was the cry of infringement of custom that was 
raised against us by the mutineers: "They aim at sub- 
verting our institutions; they have put down the suttee 
of the Brahmins, the infanticide of tlie Marattas, caste 
and adoption are despised ; they aim at destroying all 
our religious customs," was the most powerful cry that 
could be raised. It is one against which we shall never 
be wholly safe; but it is the custom and not the reli- 
gion which is the people's especial care. 

There is one point in which caste forms a singular 
difficulty in our way, which has not yet been brought 
sufficiently home to us. The comparatively fair treat- 
ment which is now extended to the low-caste and no- 
caste men is itself an insult to the high-caste nobility; 
and while the no-caste men care little how we treat 
them, provided we pay them well, and the bunnya, or 
shop-keeping class, encouraged by the improvement, 
cry out loudly that the government wrongs them in 
not treating them as Europeans, the high-caste men 
are equally disgusted with our good treatment both of 
middle-class and inferior Hindoos. These things are 
stumbling-blocks in our way, chiefly because no amount 
of acquaintance with the various phases of caste feeling 
IS sufficient to bring home its importance to English- 
men. The Indian is essentially the caste man, the 



1S8 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Saxon as characteristically the no-caste man, and it is 
dithcnlt to produce a mutual understanding. Just as 
in England the people are too democratic for the gov- 
ernment, in India the government is too democratic 
for the people. 

Although caste has hitherto heen hut little shaken, 
there are forces at work which must in time produce 
the most grave results. The return to their homes of 
natives who have emigrated and worked at sugar- 
planting in Mauritius and coffee-growing in Ceylon, 
mixing with negroes and with Europeans, will gradu- 
ally aid in the subversion of caste distinctions, and the 
Parsees will give their help toward the creation of a 
healthier feeling. The young men of the merchant- 
class— who are all pure deists — set an example of doing 
away with caste distinctions which will gradually affect 
the whole population of the towns; railways will act 
upon the laborers and agriculturists ; a closer inter- 
course with Europe will possibly go hand in hand with 
universal instruction in the English tongue, and the 
indirect results of Christian teaching will continue to 
be, as they have been, great. 

The positive results of missionary work in India 
have hitherto been small. Taking the census as a 
guide, in the district of Mooradabad we iind but 107 
Christians in 1,100,000 people; in Budaon, 64 *' Chris- 
tians, Europeans, and Eurasians" (half-castes) out of 
900,000 people; in Bareilly, 137 native Christians 
in a million and a half of people; in Shajehanpoor, 
98 in a million people; in Turrai, none in a million 
people; in Etah, no native Christians, and only twenty 
Europeans to 614,000 people; in the Banda dis- 
trict, thirteen native Christians out of three-quarters 
of a million of people; in Goruckpoor, 100 native 
Christians out of three and a half millions of peopi'e. 



CASTE. 189 

Not to mnltiply instances, this proportion is preserved 
throughout the whole of the districts, and the native 
Christians in t!ie N'orthwestare proved to form but an 
insignificant fraction of the population. 

The number of native Christians in India is ex- 
tremely small. Twenty-three societies, having three 
hundred Protestant missionary stations, more than 
three hundred native missionary churches, and five 
hundred European preachers, costing with their assist- 
ants two hundred thousand pounds a year, profess to 
show only a hundred and fifty thousand converts, of 
whom one-seventh are communicants. The majority 
of the converts who are not communicants are con- 
verts onl}^ upon paper, and it may be said that of real 
native non-Catholic Christians there are not in India 
more tlian 40,000, of whom half are to be found 
among the devil-worshipers of Madras. The so-called 
"aboriginal" hill-tribes, having no elaborate religious 
system of their own, are not tied down to the creed of 
their birth in the same way as are Mohammedans and 
Hindoos, among whom our missionaries make no way 
whatever. The native Protestant's position is a fear- 
ful one, except in such a city as Madras, for he wholly 
loses caste, and becomes an outlaw from his people. 
The native Catholic continues to be a caste man, and 
sometimes an idol-worshiper, and the priests have 
made a million converts in Southern India. 

Besides revealing the fewness of the native Chris- 
tians, the Northwestern census has shown us plainly 
the weakness of the Europeans. In the district of 
Mooradabad, 1,100,000 people are ruled by thirty- 
eight Europeans. 1\\ many places, two Europeans 
watch over 200,000 people. The Eurasians are about 
as numerous as the Europeans, to which class they 
may for some purposes be regarded as belonging, for 



190 gheateb bbitain. 

the natives reject their society, and refuse them aplacQ 
in every caste. The Eurasians are a niucli-despised 
race, the butt of every Indian story, but as a coniraii- 
nity they are not to be ranked high. That they should 
be ill educated, vain, and cringing, is perhaps only what 
we might expect of persons placed in their difficult 
position ; nevertheless, that they are so tends to lessen, 
in spite of our better feelings, the pity that we should 
otherwise extend toward them. 

The census had not only its revelations, but its re- 
sults. One eftect of the census-takinsc is to check the 
practice of infanticide, by pointing out to the notice of 
our othcers the castes and the districts in which it 
exists. The deaths of three or four hundred children 
are credited to the wolves in the Umritsur district of 
the Pun jaub alone, but it is remarked that the *' wolves" 
pick out the female infants. The great disproportion 
of the sexes is itself partly to be explained as the re- 
sult of infanticide. 

One weighty drawback to our influence upon Hindoo 
morals, is that in the case of many abuses we legislate 
without effect, our laws being evaded where they are 
outwardly obeyed. The practice of infanticide exists 
in all parts of India, but especially in Rajpootana, and 
the girls are killed chiefly in order to save the cost of 
marrying them — or, rather, of buying husbands for 
them. Now we have '' suppressed'' infanticide — which 
means that children are smothered or starved, instead 
of being exposed. It is no easy task to bring about 
reforms in the customs of the people of India. 

The many improvements in the moral condition of 
the people which the census chronicles are steps in a 
great march. Those who have known India long are 
aware that a remarkable change has come over the 
country in the last few years. Small as have been the 



MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 191 

positive visible results of Christian teaching, the indi- 
rect eft'ecta have been enormous. Among the Sikhs 
and Marattas, a spirit of reflection, of earnest thought, 
unusual in natives, has been aroused; in Bengal it has 
taken the form of pure deism, but then Bengal is not 
India. The spirit rather than the doctrinal teaching 
of Christianity has been imbibed: a love of truth 
appeals more to the feelings of the upright natives 
than do the whole of the nine-and-thirty Articles. 
Here, as elsewhere, the natives look to deeds, not 
words ; the example of a Frere is worth the teaching 
of a hundred missionaries, painstaking and earnest 
though they be. 



CHAPTER VI. 



MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 



THROuaH Mirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtchpore, I 
passed on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at 
Allahabad; for though the city is strategically im- 
portant, there is in it but little to be seen. Like all 
spots of the confluence of rivers, Allahabad is sacred 
with the Hindoos, for it stands, they say, at the meeting- 
point of no less than three great streams — the Ganges, 
the Jumna, and a river of the spirit-land. To us poor 
pagans the third stream is invisible; not so to the 
faithful. Catching a glimpse of Marochetti's statue at 
the Cawnpore well, as I hurried through that city, I 
diverged from the East Indian Kailway, and took 
dawk-carriage to Lucknow. 

As compared ^^ ith other Indian cities, the capital of 



192 GREATEK BRITAIN. 

Oude is a town to be seen in driving rather than in 
walking; the general effects are superior in charm and 
beauty to the details, and the vast size of the city 
makes mere sight-seeing a work of difficulty. More 
populous before 1857 than either Calcutta or Bombay, 
it is still twice as large as Liverpool. Not only, how- 
ever, is Lucknow the most perfect of the modern or 
Italianized Oriental towns, but there are in it several 
buildings that have each the charm of an architecture 
special to itself. Of these, the Martini^re is the most 
singular, and it looks like what it is — the freak of a 
wealthy madman. Its builder was General Martine, 
a Frenchman in the service of the Kins^s of Oude. 
Not far behind the Martiniere is the Dilkousha — a 
fantastic specimen of an Oriental hunting-lodge. The 
ordinary show-building of the place, the Kaiser-Bagh, 
or Palace of the Kings of Oude, is a paltry place enough, 
but there is a certain grandeur in the view of the great 
Imaumbara and the Hooseinabad from a point whence 
the two piles form to the eye but one. The great 
Imaumbara suffered terribly in 1858 from the wanton 
destruction which our troops committed everywhere 
during the war of the mutiny. Had they confined 
themselves to outrages such as these, however, but 
little could have been said against the conduct of the 
war. There is too much fear that the English, unless 
held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition to- 
w^ard cruelty, wherever they have a weak enemy to meet. 
The stories of the Indian mutiny and of the 
Jamaica riot are but two out of many — two that 
we happen to have heard; but the Persian war in 
1857 and the last of the Chinese campaigns are not 
without their records of deliberate barbarity and 
wrong. From the first ofiicer of one of the Peninsular 
and Oriental steamers, which was employed in carry- 



MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 193 

ing troops up the Euphrates during the Persian war, 
1 heard a story that is the type of many such. A 
Persian drummer-boy of about ten years old was seen 
bathing from the bank one morning by the officers on 
deck. Bets were made as to the chance of hitting 
him with an Enfield rifle, and one of the betters killed 
him at the first shot. 

It is not only in war time that our cruelty comes 
out; it is often seen in trifles during peace. Even 
a traveler, indeed, becomes so soon used to see the 
natives wronged in every way by people of quiet man- 
ner and apparent kindness of disposition, that he ceases 
to record the cases. In^Madras roads, for instance, I 
saw a fruit-seller hand up some limes to a lower-deck 
port, just as we were weighing anchor. Three Anglo- 
Indians (men who had been out before) asked in chorus, 
*'IIowmuch?" "One quarter rupee." "Too much." 
And, without more ado, paying nothing, they pelted 
the man with his own limes, of which he lost more 
than half. In Ceylon, near Bentotte rest-house, a 
native child oflfered a handsome cowrie (of a kind 
worth in Australia about five shillings, and certainly 
worth something in Ceylon) to the child of a Mauritius 
cofiee-planter who was traveling with us to Columbo, 
himself an old Indian officer. The white child took it, 
and would not give it up. The native chiM cried for 
money, or to have his shell back, but the mother of the 
white child exclaimed, "You be hanged; it's worth 
nothing;" and ofl:'came the shell with us in the dawk. 
Such are the small but galling wrongs inflicted daily 
upon the Indian natives. It was a maxim of the 
Portuguese Jesuits that men who live long among 
Asiatics seldom fail to learn their vices; but our older 
civilians treat the natives with strict justice, and Anglo- 
Indian ladies who have been reared in the country are 

VOL. II. 17 



194 GREATER BRITAIN. 

generally kind to their own servants, if somewhat harsh 
toward other natives. It is those who have been in the 
country from five to ten years, and especially soldiers, 
who treat the natives badly. Such men I have heard 
exclaim that the new penal code has revolutionized the 
country. "Formerly," they say, "you used to send a 
man to a police-officer or a magistrate with a note: — 

' My dear . Please give the bearer twenty lashes.' 

But now the magistrates are afraid to act, and your 
servant can have you fined for beating him." In spite 
of the lamentations of Anglo-Indians over the good old 
days, 1 noticed in all the hotels in India the significant 
notice, "Gentlemen are earnestly requested not to 
strike the servants." 

The jokes of a people against themselves are not 
worth much, but may be taken in aid of other evi- 
dence. The two favorite Anglo-Indian stories are that 
of the native who, being asked his religion, said, "Me 
Christian — me get drunk like massa;" and that of the 
young officer who, learning Hindostanee in 1858, had 
the difierence between the negative "ne" and the par- 
ticle "ne" explained to him by the moonshee, when 
he exclaimed: "Dear me! I hanged lots of natives 
last year for admitting that they had not been in their 
villages for months. I suppose they meant to say that 
they had not left their villages for months." It is cer- 
tain that in the suppression of the mutiny hundreds of 
natives were hanged by Queen's officers who, unable 
t( speak a word of any native language, could neither 
u derstand evidence nor defense. 

It is in India, when listening to a mess-table con- 
versation on the subject of looting, that we begin 
to remember our descent from Scandinavian sea-king 
robbers. Centuries of education have not purified the 
blood: our men in India can hardly set eyes upon a 



MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 195 

native prince or a Hindoo palace before they cry, 
'^What a place to break up!'' "What a fellow to 
loot!'' When I said to an officer who had been sta- 
tioned at Secrole in the early days of the mutiny, *'I 
suppose you were afraid that the Benares people 
would have attacked you," his answer was, "Well, 
for my part, I rather hoped they would, because then 
we should have thrashed them, and looted the city. 
It hadn't been looted for two hundred years." 

Those who doubt that Indian military service makes 
soldiers careless of men's lives reckless as to the rischts 
of property, and disregardful of human dignity, can 
hardly remember the letters which reached home in 
1857, in which an officer in high command during the 
march upon Cawnpore reported, "Good bag to-day; 

polished off rebels," it being borne in mind 

that the "rebels" thus hanged or blown from guns 
were not taken in arms, but villagers apprehended 
"on suspicion." During this march, atrocities were 
committed in the burning of villages, and massacre of 
innocent inhabitants, at which Mohammed Togluk 
himself would have stood ashamed, and it would be to 
contradict all history to assert that a succession of 
such deeds would not prove fatal to our liberties^ at 
home. 

The European officers of native regiments, and many 
officers formerly in the Company's service, habitually 
show great kindness to the natives, but it is fthe 
benevolent kindness of the master for a favorite slave, 
of the superior for men immeasurably beneath hiirr^ 
there is little of the feeling which a common citizen- 
ship should bestow, little of that equality of man and 
man which Christianity would seem to teach, and 
which our Indian government has for some years 
favored. 



196 GREATER BRITAIN. 

At Lucknow, I saw the Residency, and at Cawn- 
pore, on my return to the East Indian Railway, the 
intrenchnients which were, each of them, the scene in 
1857 of those defenses against the mutineers generally 
styled ^'glorious" or "heroic," though made by men 
lighting with ropes about their necks. The successful 
defenses of the fort at Arrah and of the Lucknow 
Residency were rather testimonies to the wonderful 
fighting powers of the English than to their courage, 
— for cowards would fight when the alternative was, 
fight or die. As far as Oude was concerned, the "re- 
bellion" of 1857 seems to have been rather a war than 
a mutiny; but the habits of the native princes would 
probably have led them to have acted as treacherously 
at Lucknow in the case of a surrender as did the Nana 
at Cawnpore, and our oflGlcers wisely determined that 
in no event would they treat for terms. What is to be 
regretted is that we as conquerors should have shown 
the Oude insurgents no more mercy than they would 
have shown to us, and that we should have made use 
of the pretext that the rising was a mere mutiny of 
our native troops, as an excuse for hanging in cold 
blood the agriculturists of Oude. Whatever the du- 
plicity of their rulers, whatever the provocation to 
annexation may have been, there can be no doubt 
that the revolution in the land-laws set on foot by us 
resulted in the ofiter of a career as native policemen 
or railway ticket-clerks to men whose ancestors were 
warriors and knights when ours wore woad; and we 
are responsible before mankind for having treated as 
flagrant treason and mutiny a legitimate war on the 
part of the nobility of Oude. In the ofiicial papers of 
the government of the Northwest Provinces, the so- 
called "mutiny" is styled more properly "a grievous 
civil war." 



MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 197 

There is much reason to fear, not that the mutiny 
will be too long remembered, but that it will be too 
soon forgotten. Ten years ago, Monghyr was an ash- 
heap, Cawnpore a name of horror, Delhi a stronghold 
of armed rebels, yet now we can travel without change 
of cars through peaceful and prosperous Monghyr and 
Cawnpore — a thousand and twenty miles — in fort;y 
hours, and find at the end of our journey that shaded 
boulevards have already taken the place of the walls 
of Delhi. 

Quitting the main line of the East Indian Kailway at 
Toondla Junction, I passed over a newly-made branch 
road to Agra. The line was but lately opened, and 
birds without number sat upon the telegraph-posts, and 
were seemingly too astonished to fly away from the 
train, while, on the open barrens, herds of Indian 
antelopes grazed fearlessly, and took no notice of us 
when we passed. 

Long before we entered Akbarabad, as the city 
should be called, by the great new bridge across the 
Jumna, I had sighted in the far distance the majestic, 
shining dome of the famed Taj Mahal ; but when 
arrived within the city, I first visited the citadel and 
ramparts. The fort and palace of Akbar are the 
Moslem creed in stone. Without — turned toward the 
unbeliever and the foe — the far-famed triple walls, 
frowning one above the other with the frown that a 
hill-fanatic wears before he strikes the infidel ; within 
is the secure paradise of the believing *' Emperor of 
the world" — delicious fountains pouring into basins of 
the whitest marble, beds of rose and myrtle, balconies 
and pavilions ; part of the zenana, or women's wing, 
overhanging the river, and commanding the distant 
snow-dome of the Taj. Within, too, the *' Motee Mus- 
jid" — "Pearl of Mosques" in fact as well as name — a 

It* 



198 GREATER BRITAIN. 

marble-cloistered court, to which an angel architect 
could not add a stone, nor snatch one from it, without 
spoiling all. These for believers; for non-believers 
the grim old Saracenic " Hall of the Seat of Judgment." 
The palace, except the mosque, which is purity itself, 
is overlaid with a crust of gems. There is one famed 
chamber — a woman's bath-house — the roof and sides 
of which are covered with tiny silver-mounted mirrors, 
placed at such angles as to reiiect to inlinity the figures 
of those who stand within the bath ; and a court is 
near at hand, paved with marble squares in black and 
white, over which Akbar and his vizier used to sit and 
gravely play at draughts with danciuggirls for '* pieces." 

On the river bank, a mile from Akbar's palace, in 
the center of a vast garden entered through the noblest 
gateways in the world, stands the Taj Mahal, a terrace 
rising in dazzling whiteness from a black mass of 
cypresses, and b'earing four lofty, delicate minars, and 
the central pile that gleams like an Alp against the 
deep-blue sky — minars, terrace, tomb, all of spotless 
marble and faultless shape. Its Persian builders named 
the Taj " the palace floating in the air." 

Out of the fierce heat and blazing sunlight you enter 
into chill and darkness, but soon begin to see the hol- 
low dome growing into form above your head, and the 
tomb itself — that of Noor Mahal, the favorite queen of 
Shah Jehan — before you, and beside it her husband's 
humbler grave. Though within and without the Taj 
is white, still here you find the walls profusely jeweled, 
and the purity retained. Flowers are pictured on every 
block in mosaic of cinnamon -stone, carnelian, tur- 
quoise, amethyst, and emerald; the corridors contain 
the w4iole Koran, inlaid in jet-black stone, yet the 
interior as a whole exceeds in chastity the spotlessness 
of the outer dome. Oriental, it is not barbaric, and a 



MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 199 

sweet melanchol)' is the effect the Taj produces on the 
mind, when seen by day; in the still moonlight, the 
form is too mysterious to be touching. 

In a Persian manuscript, there still remains a cata- 
logue of the prices of the gems made use of in the 
building of the Taj, and of the places from which they 
came. Among those named are coral from Arabia, 
sapphires from Moldavia, amethysts from Persia, crys- 
tal from China, turquoises from Thibet, diamonds from 
Bundelcund, and lapis-lazuli from Ceylon. The stones 
were presents or tribute to the emperor, and the master- 
masons came mostly from Constantinople and Bagdad 
— a fact which should be remembered when we are 
discussing the intellectual capacity of the Bengal Hin- 
doos. That a people who paint their cows pink with 
green spots, and their horses orange or bright red, 
should be the authors of the Pearl Mosque and the 
Taj, would be too wonderful for our belief; but the 
Mohammedan conquerors brought with them the 
chosen artists of the Moslem world. The contrast 
between the Taj and the Monkey Temple at Benares 
reminds one of that between a Cashmere and a Nor- 
wich shawl. 

It is not at Agra alone that we meet the works of 
Mogul emperors. Much as we have ourselves done in 
building roads and bridges, there are many parts of 
Upper India where the traces of the Moslem are still 
more numerous than are at present those of the later 
conquerors of the unfortunate Hindoos. Mosques, 
forts, conduits, bridges, gardens — all the works of the 
Moguls are both solid and magnificent, and it was with 
almost reverential feelings that I made my pilgrimage 
to the tomb at Secundra of the great Emperor Akbar, 
grandfather of Shah Jehan, son of Hoomayoon, and 
founder of Agra City. 



200 GREATER BRITAIN. 

It is to be remarked that the Mohammedans in India 
make a considerable show for their small numbers. 
Of the great cities of India, the three Presidency 
towns are English; and the three gigantixj cities of 
Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow, chiefly Mohammedan. Be- 
nares alone is a Hindoo city, and even in Benares tho 
Mohammedans have their temples. All the great 
buildings of India are Mohammedan; so are all the 
great works that are not English. Yet even in the 
Agra district the Mohammedans are only one-twelfth 
of the population, but they live chiefly in the towns. 

The history of the Mogul empire of India from the 
time of the conquest of the older empire by Tamer- 
lane in the fourteenth century, and the forced conver- 
sion to Mohammedanism of a vast number of Hindoos, 
and that of Akbar's splendor and enormous power, 
down to the transportation of the last emperor in 1857 
to Rangoon, and the shooting of his sons in a dry ditch 
by Captain Ilodson, is one for us to ponder carefully. 
Those who know what we have done in India, say that 
even in our codes — and they are allowed to be our best 
claim to the world's applause — we fall short of Akbar's 
standard. 

Delhi, the work of Shah Jehan, founder of the Taj 
and the Pearl Mosque, was built by himself in a wil- 
derness, as was Agra by the Emperor Akbar. We 
who have seen the time that has passed since its foun- 
dation by Washington before the capital of the United 
States has grown out of the village shape, cannot deny 
that the Mogul emperors, if they were despots, were at 
least tyrants possessed of imperial energy. Akbar 
built Agra twenty or thirty miles from Futtehpore 
Sikri, his former capital, but Jehan had the harder 
task of forcing his people to quit an earlier sitp »iot 



MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 201 

five miles from modern Delhi, while Akbar merely 
moved his palace and let the people follow. 

Delhi suffered so much at our hands during the 
storm in 1857, and has suffered so much since in the 
way of Napoleonic boulevards intended to prevent the 
necessity of storming it again, that it must be much 
chanired from what it was before the war. The walls 
which surround the whole city are nearly as grand as 
those of the fort at Agra, and the gate towers are very 
Gibraltars of brick and stone, as we found to our cost 
when we battered the Cashmere Gate in 1857. The 
palace and the Motee Musjid are extremely fine, but 
inferior to their namesakes at Agra; and the Jumna 
Musjid — reputed the most beautiful as it is the largest 
mosque in the world — impressed me only by its size. 
The view, however, from its minars is one of the whole 
Northwest. The vast city becomes an ant-heap, and 
you instinctively peer out into space, and try to dis- 
cern the sea toward Calcutta or Bombay. 

The historical memories that attach to Delhi differ 
from those that we associate with the name of Agra. 
There is little pleasure in the contemplation of the 
zenana, where the miserable old man, the last of the 
Moguls, dawdled away his years. 



202 ORE ATE R BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER VII. 



SIMLA. 



After visiting ^Nicholson's tomb at the Cashmere 
it^ie, I entered my one-horse dawk — the regulation 
04iniage oflndia — and set ott' for Kurnaul and Simla, 
pa«v«*.ng between the sand-hills, gravel-pits, and ruined 
inos»|Ues through which the rebel cavalry made their 
famous sortie upon our camp. It was evening when 
we started, and as the dawk-gharrees are so arranged 
that you can lie with comfort at full-length, but cannot 
sit Avithout misery, I brought my canvas bag into ser- 
vice as ft pillow, and was soon asleep. 

When I woke, we had stopped; and Avhen I drew 
the slidit^g shutter that does duty for door and window, 
and peered out into the darkness, I discovered' tliat 
there was no horse in the shafts, and that mv driver 
and his horse syce— or groom — were smoking their 
hubble-bubbles at a well in the company of a passing 
friend. By making free use of the strongest language 
that my dictionary contained, I prevailed upon the men 
to put in a fresh horse; but starting was a ditferent 
matter. The horse refused to buda-e an inch, except, 
indeed, backwards, or sideways toward the ditch. Six 
grooms came running from the stable, and placed them- 
selves one at each wheel, and one on each side of the 
horse, while many boys pushed behind. At a signal 
from the driver, the four wheelmen threw their whole 
weight on the spokes, and one of the men at the horse's 



Q 



SIMLA. 20.- 

h^jad L«it) up the obstinate brute's oft* fore-leg, so that 
h6 was fairly ruu oft* the ground, and forced to make a 
start, Avhich he did witli a violent plunge, for which all 
the grooms were, however, well prepared. As they 
yelled with triumph, we dashed along for some twenty 
yards, then swerved sideways, and came to a dead stop. 
Again and again the starting process was repeated, till 
at last the horse went oft" at a gallop, which carried us 
to the end of the stage. This is the only form of start- 
ing known to np-country horses, as I soon found; but 
sometimes even this ceremony fails to start the horse, 
and twice in the Uelhi-to-Kalka journey we lost a 
quarter of an hour over horses, and had iinally to get 
others from the stable. 

About midnight, we reached a government bunga- 
low, or roadside inn, where I was to sup, and five 
minutes produced a chicken curry which, in spite of 
its hardness, was disposed of in as many more. Mean- 
while a storm had come rumbling and roaring across 
the skies, and when I went to the door to start, the 
bungalow ]>utler and cook pointed to the gharree, and 
told me that driver and horse were gone. ISTot wish- 
ing the bungalow men to discover how small was my 
stock of Ilindostanee, I paid careful attention to their 
conversation, and looked up each time that I heard 
"sahib," as I knew that then they must be talking 
about me. Seeing this, they seemed to agree that I 
was a thorough Ilindostanee scholar, but too proud to 
answer when they spoke. While they were humbly 
requesting that I would bow to the storm and sleep in 
the bungalow, which was filled with twittering spar- 
rows, waked by the thunder or the lights, I was read- 
ing my dictionary by the faint glimmer of the cocoa- 
nut oil-lamp, and trying to find out how I was to declare 
that I insisted on going on at once. When at la3t I 



204 GREATER BRITAIN. 

hit upon my phrase, the storm was over, and the butler 
soon found both horse and driver. After this adven- 
ture, my Hindostanee improved fast. 

A remarkable misapprehension prevails in England 
concerning the languages of India. The natives of 
India, we are inclined to believe, speak Hindostanee, 
which is the language of India as English is that of 
Britain. The truth is that there are in India a multi- 
tude of languages, of which Hindostanee is not even 
one. Besides the great tongues, Urdu, Maratti, and 
Tamil, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of local 
languages, and innumerable dialects of each. Hindo- 
stanee is a camp language, which contains many native 
words, but which also is largely composed of imported 
Arabic and Persian words, and which is not without 
specimens of English and Portuguese. " Saboon," for 
soap, is the latter; "glassie," for a tumbler, and 
"istubul," for a stable, the former: but almost every 
common English phrase and English word of command 
forms in a certain measure part of the Hindostanee 
tongue. Some terms have been ingeniously perverted ; 
for instance, " Who comes there ?• ' has become '* Hook- 
um dar?" ^' Stand at ease!" is changed to " Tundel 
tis," and "Present arms!" to "Furvunt arm!" The 
Hindostanee name for a European lady is '' mem sahib," 
a feminine formed from ^^ sahib" — lord, or European 
— by prefixing to it the English servants' *' mum," or 
corruption of "madam." Some pure Hindostanee 
words have a comical sound enough to English ears, as 
" hookm," an order, pronounced " hook'em ;" ** misri," 
sugar, which sounds like "misery;" "top," fever; 
" molly," a gardener; and "dolly," a bundle of vege- 
tables. 

Dawk traveling i^ the Punjaub is by no moans 
unpleivsftRtj by oight you sleep soundly, and by day 



SIMLA. 205 

there is no lack of life in the mere traffic on the road, 
while the general scene is full of charm. Here and 
there are serais, or corrals, built by the Mogul empe- 
rors or by the British government for the use of native 
travelers. Our word "caravansery" is properly "cara- 
van-serai," an inclosure for the use of those traveling 
in caravans. The keeper of the serai supplies water, 
provender, and food, and at night the serais along the 
road glow with the cooking-lires and resound with the 
voices of thousands of natives, who when on journeys 
never seem to sleep. Throughout the plains of India, 
the high-roads pass villages, serais, police-stations, and 
groups of trees at almost equal intervals. The space 
between clump and clump is generally about three 
miles, and in this distance you never see a house, so 
compact are the Indian villages. The Northwest Prov- 
inces are the most densely-peopled countries of the 
world, yet between village and village you often see 
no trace of man, while jackals and wild blue-cows 
roam about as freely as though the country were an 
untrodden wilderness. 

Each time you reach a clump of banj^ans, tamarind 
and tulip trees, you find the same tenants of its shades: 
village police-station, government posting-stable, and 
serai are always inclosed within its limits. All the 
villages are fortified with lofty walls of mud or brick, 
as are the numerous police-stations along the road, 
where the military constabulary, in their dark-blue 
tunics, yellow trowsers, and huge puggrees of bright 
red, rise up from sleep or hookah as you pass, and, 
turning out with tulwdrs and rifles, perform the mili- 
tary salute — due in India to the white face from all 
native troops. Your skin here is your patent of aris- 
tocracy and your passport, all in one. 

It is not only by the police and troops that you are 

VOL II. 18 



206 OEEATEIi BRITAIN. 

srtlutod: the natives all sulaaiu to you— except mero 
coolies^ who do not think theniselvea worthy even to 
olt'or a saluto — ami many Anglo-Indians reluse to re- 
turn their bow. Every Knglislunan in India ouglit to 
act as tlh>uu:h ho were an anibassjidor of the Queen 
and people, and regulate accordingly his conduct in 
the most tritling things; but too often the low bow 
and humble '* Salaam sahib'' is not acknowledged even 
by a curt *' Salaam." 

In the drier portions of the country, women were 
busy with knives digging up little roots of grass for 
horse-food ; atul four or live times a day a great bugling 
would be heard and answered by my driver, while the 
mail-cart shot by us at full speed. The astonishment 
with which I looked upon the Indian plains grew even 
stronger as I advanced up country. Not only is bush 
scarce, and forest never seen, but where there is jungle 
it is of the thinnest and least tropical kind. It would 
be harder to travei-se, ou horse or foot, the thinnest 
coppice in the south of England than the densest jungle 
in the plain country of all India. 

Both in the villages and in the desert portions of the 
road, the ground-squirrels galloped in troops before the 
dawk, and birds without number hopped fearlessly be- 
side us as we passed; hoopoes, blue-jays, and miaas 
were the commonest, but there were many paddy-birds 
and graceful golden egrets in the lower grounds. 

Between Delhi and Kurnaul were many ruins, now 
green with the pomegranate leaf, now scarlet with the 
bloom of the peacock-tree, and, about the ancient vil- 
lages, acre after acre of plantain-garden, irrigated by 
the conduits of the Mohammedan conquerors; at last, 
Kurnaul itself — a fortilied town — seen through a forest 
of date, wild mango, and banyan, with patches of wheat 
about it, and strings of laden camels winding along the 



SIMLA. 207 

d\}Hty road. After a hlieeHtio liail poared a Bklnf'ul of 
water over me, I set off ai^aiii for Kalka, halting in tlie 
territory of the Piittiala llajah to see fjiB gardens at 
Pinjore, and then passed on toward the ba.se of the 
Himahiyan foot-hills. The w h fiat- liarvest was in pro<^- 
ress in the Kalka country, and the girls, reaping with 
the siekje, and carrying away the sheaves ii[><jn their 
lieads, bore themselves graceful I3', as Hindoo women 
ever do, and formed a contrast to tlie coarse old land- 
owners as these rode past, each followed by iiis pipe- 
bearer and his retinue. 

A Goorkha battalion and a Thibetan goat-train had 
just entered Kalka when I reached it, and the confu- 
sion was such that I started at once in a jampan up the 
sides of the brown and desolate hills. A jampan, called 
tonjon in Ma<iras, is an arm-chair in shafts, and built 
more lightly tiian a sedan; it is carried at a short trut 
by four men, while another four, and a mate or chief, 
make their way up the hills before you, and meet you 
bore and there to relieve guard. The hire of the jam- 
pan and nine men is less than thatof a pony and groom 
— a curious illustration of the cheapness of labor in the 
East. When you lirst reach India, this cheapness is a 
standing wonder. At your hotel at Calcutta you are 
asked, " You wish boy pull punkah all night'/ i>oy 
pull punkah all day and all night for two annas" C6d.); 
On some parts of the railway lines, where there is also 
a good road, the natives iind it cheaper to travel by 
palankeen than to ride in a third-class railway car- 
riage. It is cheaper in Calcutta to be carried by four 
men in apaiki than to ride in a ^'second class gharry,' 
or very bad cab; and the streets of the city ai'e inva- 
riabl}^ watered by hand by bheesties with skins. The 
key to Indian politics lies in these facts. 

At Wilson's at Calcutta, the rule of the hotel obliges 



208 OBEATER DBITAIN. 

one to hire a kitmutghar, who waits at table. This I 
did for the magniticent wage of 11(/. a day, out of which 
Cherry — the nearest phonetic spelling of my man's 
name — of course fed and kept himself I will do him 
the justice to add that he managed to make about 
another shilline: a dav out of me, and that he always 
brought me small change in copper, on the chance that 
I should give it him. Small as seemed these wages, I 
could have hired him for one-lifth the rate that I have 
named had I been ready to retain him in my service 
for a month or two. Wages in India are somewhat 
raised by the practice of dustooree — a custom by which 
every native, high or low, takes toll of all money that 
passes through his hands. My tirst introduction to 
this institution struck me forcibly, though afterward 
I came to look upon it as tranquilly as old Indians do. 
It was in the gardens of the Tai, where, to relieve mv- 
self from importunity, I had bought a photograph of 
the dome : a native servant of the hotel, who accom- 
panied me much against my will, and who, being far 
more ignorant of English than I was of llindostanee, 
was of absolutely no use, I had at last succeeded in 
warning otf from my side, but directly I bought the 
photograph for half a rupee, he rushed upon the seller, 
and claimed one-fourth of the price, or two annas, as 
his share, I having transgressed his privilege in buy- 
inir directly instead of throuo-h him as intermediary. 
I remonstrated, but to my anuizement the seller paid 
the money quietly, and evidently looked on me as a 
meddling sort of fellow enough for interfering with 
the institution of dustooree. Customs, after all, are 
much the same throughout the world. Our sportsmen 
follow the habit of Confucius, whose disciples two or 
three thousand yeai*s ago proclaimed that *'he angled, 
but did not use a net; he shot, but not at biixls perch- 



SIMLA. 209 

in^;" our scrvantR, perhapH, are not altogether inno- 
cent of dustooree. However much wageB may be 
Rupplemented by diiBtooree, they are low enough to 
ullow of the keeping of a tribe of servants by persons 
of moderate incomes. A small family at Himla *'re- 
qnii'e" three body scn'ants, two cooks, one butler, 
two grooms, two gardeners, two messengers, two 
iiurHes, two washermen, two water-carriers, thirteen 
jampan-men, one sweeper, one lamp-cleaner, and one 
boy, besides the European lady's maid, or thirty-five 
in all; but if wages were doubled, perhaps fewer men 
would be '* absolutely needed.'' At the house where 
I stayed at Himla, ten jampan-men and two gardeners 
were supposed to be continuously employed in a tiny 
flower-garden round the house. To a Europearr fresh 
from the temperate climates there is something irk- 
some in the restraint produced by the constant pres- 
en(!e of servants in every corner of an Indian house. 
To pull oft' one's own socks or pour out the water into 
the basin for one's self becomes a much-longed-for lux- 
ury. It is far from pleasant to have three or four 
natives squatting in front of your door, with nothing 
to do \udess you find such odd jobs for them as hold- 
ing the heel of your boot while you pull it on, or 
l)rushing your clothes for the fourteenth time. 

The greater or less value of the smallest coin in 
common use in a country is a rough test of the wealth 
or poverty of its inhabitants, and by the application of 
it to India we find that country poor indeed. At Agra, 
T had gone to a money-changer in the bazaar, and 
asked him for change, in the cowrie-shells which do 
duty as money, for an anna, or l^d. piece. He gave 
me handful after handful, +ill I cried enough. Yet 
when in the afternoon of the same day I had a per- 
formance on my threshold of '' Tasa-ba-tasa " — that 

18* 



210 GREATER BRITAIN. 

singular tune which reigns from Java ta the Bos- 
phorus, with Sanscrit words in Persia, and Malay 
words in the Eastern islands — the three players 
seemed grateful for half a dozen of the cowries, for 
they treated me to a native version of " Vee vont gah 
ham tall maixiid, vee vont gah ham tall mardid," by 
way of thanks. Many strange natural objects pass 
as uncoined money in the East: tusks in Africa, 
v/omen in Arabia, human skulls in Borneo; the Red 
Indians of America sell their neighbors' scalps for 
money, but have not yet reached the height of civili- 
zation which would be denoted by their keeping 
them to use as such ; cowrie-shells, however, pass as 
money in almost every ancient trading country of the 
world. 

The historical cheapness of labor in India has led to 
such an obstinate aversion to all labor-saving expe- 
dients that such great works as the making ot railway 
embankments and the boulevard construction at Delhi 
are conducted by the scraping together of earth with 
the hands, and the collected pile is slowly placed in 
tiny baskets, much like strawberry pottles, and borne 
away on women's heads to its new destination. Wheel- 
barrows, water-carts, picks, and shovels are in India 
all unknown. 

If, on my road from Kalka to Simla, I had an exam- 
ple of the cheapness of Indian labor, I also had one 
of its efficiency. The coolie who carried my baggage 
on his head trotted up the hills for twenty-one houi'S, 
without halting for more than an hour or two, and 
this for two days' pay. 

During the first half hour after leaving Kalka, the 
heat was as great as on the plains, but we had not 
gone many miles before we came out of the heat and 
dust into a new world, and an atmosphere every oreath 



SIMLA. 211 

of which was life. I got out, and walked for miles; 
and when we halted at a rest-house on the first plateau, 
I thoroughly enjoyed a cup of the mountain tea, and 
was still more pleased at the sight of the first red-coated 
Entj^lish soldiers that I had seen since I left Niao^ara. 
The men were even attempting bowls and cricket, so 
cool were the evenings at this station. There is grim 
satire in the fact that the director-general of military 
gymnastics has his establishment at Simla, in the cold 
of the Snowy Range, and there invents running drills 
and such like summer divereions, to be executed by 
the unfortunates in the plains below. Bowls, which 
are an amusement at Kussoolie, would in the hot 
weather be death at Kalka, only ten miles away ; but 
so short is the memory of climate that you are no 
more able to conceive the heat of the plains when in 
the hills than the cold of the hills when at Calcutta. 

There is no reason except a slight and temporary 
increase of cost to prevent the whole of the European 
troops in India being concentrated in a few cool and 
healthy stations. Provided that all the artillery be 
retained in the hands of the Europeans, almost the 
whole of the English forces might be kept in half a 
dozen hill-stations, of w^hich Darjeeling and Bangalore 
would be two, and some place near Bombay a third. 
It has been said that the men would be incapable, 
througl;! w^ant of acclimatization, of acting on the plains 
if retained in hill-stations except when their services 
were needed; but it is notoriously the fact that new- 
comers from England — that is, men with health — do 
not 8ufi:er seriously from heat during the first six months 
which they pass upon the plains. 

Soon after dark, a terrific thunder-storm came on, the 
thunder rolling round the valleys and along the ridges, 
while the rain fell in short, sharp showers. My men 



21*2 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

put me down on the lee-side of ix liiit, and squatted for 
a long smoke. The custom common to all the Eastern 
races of sittintr round a fire smoking all night long 
explains the number and the excellence of their tales 
and legends. In Europe we see the Swedish peasants 
sitting round their hearths chatting during the long 
winter evenings: hence follow naturally the Thor 
legends ; our sailors are with us the only men given 
to sitting in groups to talk: they are noted story-tellers. 
The word ''yarn" exemplifies the whole philosophy of 
the matter. We meet, however, here the eternal dif- 
ficulty of which is cause and which is effect. It is easy 
to say that the long nights of Norway, the confined space 
of the ship, making the fo'castle the sailor's only lounge, 
each in their way necessitate the story-telling; not so 
hi India, not so in Egypt, in Arabia, in Persia: there 
can here be no necessity tor men sitting up all night to 
talk, short of pure love of talk for talking's sake. 

When the light came in the morning, we were as- 
cending the same strangely-ribbed hills that we had 
been crossing by torchlight during the night, and were 
meeting Chinese-faced Thibetans, with hair done into 
many pig-tails, who were laboriously bringing over the 
mountain passes Chinese goods in tiny sheep-loads. 
For miles I journe3'ed on, up mountain sides and 
down into ravines, but never for a single moment 
upon a level, catching sight sometimes of portions oi 
the Snowy Range itself, far distant, and half mingled 
with the clouds, till at last a huge mountain mass 
rising' to the north and east blocked out all view save 
that behind me over the sea of hills that I had crossed, 
and the scene became monotonously hideous, with only 
that o-randeur which hugeness carries with it — a view, 
in short, that would be fine at sunset, and at no other 
time. The weather, too, grew damp and cold — a cruel 



SIMLA. 213 

cold, with driving rain— rg^nd the landscape was dreari- 
ness itsolf. 

Suddenly we crossed the ridge, and hegan to de- 
scend, when the sky cleared, and I found myself on 
the edge of the rhododendron forest — tall trees with 
dark-green leaves and masses of crimson flowers; 
ferns of a hundred different kinds marking the hods 
of the rivulets that coursed down through the woods, 
which were filled with troops of chattering monkeys. 

Rising again slightly, I hegan to pass the European 
bungalows, each in its thicket of deodar, and few with 
fiat ground enough for more than half a rose-bed or a 
quarter of a croquet-ground. On either side the ridge 
was a deep valley, with terraced rice-fields five thou- 
sand feet below, and, in the distance, on the one side 
the mist-covered plains lit by the single silvery rib- 
bon of the distant Sutlej, on the other side the Snowy 
liange. 

The first Europeans whom I met in Simla were the 
Viceroy's children and their nurses, who formed with 
their escort a stately procession. First came a tall 
native in scarlet, then a jampan with a child, then one 
with a nurse and viceregid ]>aby, and so on, the bearers 
wearing scarlet and gray. All the residents at Simla 
have different uniforms for their jampanees, some 
clothing their men in red and green, some in pur})le 
and yellow, some in black and white. Before reach- 
ing the center of the town, I had met several Europeans 
riding, although the sun was still high and hot; but 
before evening a hailstorm came across the range and 
filled the woods with a chilling mist, and night found 
me toasting my feet at a blazing fire in an Alpine room 
of polished pine — a real room, with doors and case- 
ment; not a section of a street with a bed in it, us are 
the rooms in the Indian plains. Two blankets were a 



214 GREATER BRITAIN. 

hixurj in this "tropical climate of Simla," as one of 
our best-informed London newspapers once called it. 
The fact is that Simla, which stands at from seven to 
eight thousand feet above the sea, and in latitude 81°, 
or 7° north of the boundary of the tropics, has a climate 
cold in everything except its sun, which is sometimes 
strong. The snow lies on the ground at intervals for 
five months of the year ; and during what is by courtesy 
styled *' the hot weather," cold rains are of frequent 
occurrence. 

The climate of Simla is no mere matter of curiosity ; 
it is a question of serious interest in connection with 
the retention of our Indian empire. When the gov- 
ernment seeks refuge here from the Calcutta heat, the 
various departments are located in tiny cottages and 
bungalows up on the mountain and down in the valley, 
practically as far from each other as London from 
Brighton ; and, moreover, Simla itself is forty miles 
from Kalka by the shortest path, and sixty by the bet- 
ter bridle-path. There is clearly much loss of time in 
sending dispatches for half the year to and from a place 
like this, and there is no chance of the railway ever 
coming nearer to it than Kalka, even if it reaches that. 
On the other hand, the telegraph is replacing the rail- 
way day by day, and mountain heights are no bar to 
wires. This poor, little, uneven hill-village has been 
styled the '' Indian Capua" and nicknamed the " Hill 
Versailles;" but so far from enervating the ministers 
or enfeebling the administration, Simla gives vigor to 
the government, and a hearty English tone to the State 
papers issued in the hot months. English ministers 
are not in London all the year long, and no men, min- 
isters or not, could stand four years' continual brain- 
work in Calcutta. In 1866, the first year of the re- 
moval of the government as a whole and publication 



1 



SIMLA. 215 

of the Gazette at Simla during the summer, all the 
arrears of work in all the offices were cleared off for 
the iirst time since the occupation by us of any part 
of India. 

Bengal, the ^N'orthwest Provinces, and the Punjaub 
must soon be made into "governorships," instead of 
"lieutenant-governorships," so that the Viceroy may 
be relieved from tedious work, and time saved by the 
Northern Governors reporting straight home, as do the 
Governors of Madras and Bombay, unless a system be 
adopted under which all shall report to the Vicero}^ 
At all events, the five divisions must be put upon the 
same footing one with another. This being granted, 
there is no conceivable reason for keeping the Viceroy 
at Calcutta — a city singularly hot, unhealthy, and out 
of the way. On our Council of India, sitting at the 
capital, we ought to have natives picked from all India 
for their honesty, ability, and discretion ; but so bad 
is the water at Calcutta, that the city is deadly to 
water-drinkers; and although they value the distinc- 
tion of a seat at the Council more than any other 
honor within their reach, many of the most distin- 
guished natives in India have chosen to resign their 
places rather than pass a second season at Calcutta. 

It is not necessary that we should argue about Cal- 
cutta's disadvantages. It is enough to say that, of all 
Indian cities, we have selected for our capital the most 
distant and the most unhealthy. The great question 
is. Shall we have one capital, or two? Shall we keep 
the Viceroy all the year round in a central but hot 
position, such as Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, or Jubbel- 
pore, or else at a less central but cooler station, such as 
Nassuck, Poonah, Bangalore, or Mussoorie? or shall 
we keep him at a central place during the cool, and a 
hill place during the hot weather? There can be but 



216 GREATER BRITAIN. 

little doubt that Simla is a necessity at present, but 
witli a fairly licaltby city, such as Agra, for the head- 
quarters of the governineut, and the railway open to 
within a few miles of Mussoorie, so that men could 
run to the hills in six or seveu hours, and even spend 
a few days there in each summer month, an efficient 
government could be maintained in the plains. We 
must remember that Agra is now within twenty-three 
days of London; and that, with the Pei'sian Gulf route 
open, and a railway from Kurrachee (the natural port 
of England in India), leave for home would be a mat- 
ter still more simple than itluus become already. With 
some such central town as Poonah for the capital, the 
Bombay and Madras commander-in-chiefships could 
be abolished, with the result of saving a considerable 
expense, and greatly increasing the efficiency of the 
Indian army. It is probable that Simla will not con- 
tinue to be the chosen station of the government in 
the hills. The town is subject to the ravages of dys- 
entery; the cost of draining it would be immense, and 
the water supply is very limited; the bheesties have 
often to wait whole hours for their turn. 

Mussoorie has all the advantac^es and none of the 
drawbacks of Simla, and lies compactly in ground 
on which a small city could be built, whereas Simla 
straggles along a narrow mountain ridge, and up and 
down the steep sides of an Alpine peak. It is ques- 
tionable, however, whether, if India is to be governed 
from at home, the seat of government should not be 
at Poonah, within reach of London. The telegraph 
has already made viceroys of the ancient kind impos- 
sible. 

The sunrise view of the Snowy Range from my bun- 
galow was one rather strange, from the multitude of 
peaks in sight at once, than either beautiful or grand. 



COL ONIZA TION. 217 

The desolate ranges of foot-hills destroy the beauty 
that the contrast of the deodars, the crimson rhododen- 
drons, and the snow would otherwise produce, and the 
height at which you stand seems to dwarf the distant 
ranges; but from one of the spots which I reached in 
a mountain march, the prospect was widely different. 
Here we saw at once the sources of the Jumna, the 
8utlej, and the Ganges, the dazzling peaks of Gun- 
gootrie, of Jumnotrie, and of Kamet; while behind us 
in the distant plains we could trace the Sutlej itself, 
silvered by the hazy ra^^s of the half-risen sun. We 
had in sight not only the 26,000 feet of Kamet, but no 
less than twenty other peaks of over 20,000 feet, snow- 
clad to their very bases, while between us and the near- 
est outlying range were valleys from which the ear 
caught the humble murmur of fresh-risen streams. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

COLONIZATION. 

Connected with the question of the site of the future 
capital is that of the possibility of the colonization by 
Englishmen of portions of the peninsula of India. 

Hitherto the attempts at settlement which have been 
made have been mainly confined to six districts — My- 
soie, where there are only some dozen planters; the 
Keilgherries proper, where coffee-planting is largely 
carried on; Oude, where many Europeans have taken 
land as zemindars, and cultivate a portion of it, while 
they let out the remainder to natives on the Metayer 
plan ; Bengal, where indigo-planting is gaining ground ; 

VOL. IL 19 



218 GREATER BRITAIN. 

the Himalayan valleys, and Assam. Settlement in the 
hot plains is limited by the fact that English children 
cannot there be reared, so to the hill districts the dis- 
cussion must be confined. 

One of the commonest of mistakes respecting India 
consists in the supposition that there is available land 
in large quantities on the slopes of the Himalayas. 
There are no Himalayan slopes; the country is all 
straight up and down, and for English colonists there 
is no room — no ground that will grow anything but 
deodars, and those only moderately well. The hot sun 
dries the ground, and the violent rains follow, and cut 
it through and through with deep channels, in this way 
gradually making all the hills both steep and ribbed. 
Mysore is still a native State, but, in spite of this, Eu- 
ropean settlement is increasing year by year, and there, 
as in the ]N"eilgherries proper, there is room for many 
coffee-planters, though fever is not unknown ; but when 
India is carefully surveyed, the only district that ap- 
pears to be thoroughly suited to English settlement, 
as contrasted with mere planting or land-holding, is the 
valley of Cashmere, where the race would probably not 
suffer deterioration. With the exception of Cashmere, 
none of the deep mountain valleys are cool enough for 
permanent European settlement. Family life is im- 
possible where there is no home; you can have no 
English comfort, no English virtues, in a climate which 
forces your people to live out of doors, or else in rock- 
ing-chairs or hammocks. ITight-work and reading are 
ail-but impossible in a climate where multitudes of in- 
sects haunt the air. In the Himalayan valleys, the hot 
weather is terribly scorching, and it lasts for half the 
year, and on the hill-sides there is but little fertile soil. 

The civilians and rulers of India in general are ex- 
tremely jealous of the "interlopers," as European set- 



COLONIZATION. 219 

tiers are termed ; and, although tea-cultivation was at 
first encouraged by the Bengal government, recent 
legislation, fair or unfair, has almost ruined the tea- 
planters of Assam. The native population of that 
district is averse to labor, and coolies from a distance 
have to be brought in ; but the government of India, 
as the planters say, interferes with hareh and narrow 
regulations, and so enormously increases the cost of 
imported labor as to ruin the planters, who, even when 
they have got their laborers on the ground, cannot 
make them work, as there exists no means of compel- 
ling specific performance of a contract to work. The 
remedy known to the English law is an action for 
damages brought by the employer against the laborer, 
so with English obstinacy we declare that an action for 
damages shall be the remedy in Burmah or Assam. A 
provision for attachment of goods and imprisonment of 
person of laborers refusing to perform their portion of 
a contract to work w^as inscribed in the draft of the 
proposed Indian " Code of Civil Procedure," but vetoed 
by the authorities at home. 

The Spanish Jesuits themselves were not more afraid 
of free white settlers than is our Bengal government. 
An enterprising merchant of Calcutta lately obtained 
a grant of vast tracts of country in the Sunderbunds — 
the fever-haunted jungle near Calcutta — and had 
already completed his arrangements for importing 
Chinese laborers to cultivate his acquisitions, when 
the jealous civilians got wind of the affair, and forced 
government into a most undignified retreat from theii 
agreement. 

The secret of this opposition to settlement by Eura 
peans lies partly in a horror of "low-caste Englishmen,' 
and a fear that they will somewhat debase European?^, 
in native eyes, but far more in the wish of the old 



220 GREATER BRITAIN, 

civilians to keep India to themselves as a sort of 
"happy hunting-ground" — a wish which has prompted 
them to start the cry of " India for the Indians" — which 
of course means India for the Anglo-Indians. 

Somewhat apart from the question of European 
colonization, but closely related to it, is that of the 
holding by Europeans of landed estates in India. It 
will perhaps be conceded that the European should, 
on the one hand, be allowed to come into the market 
and purchase land, or rent it from the government or 
from individuals, on the same conditions as those which 
would apply to natives, and, on the other hand, that 
special grants should not be made to Europeans as 
they were by us in Java in old times. In Eastern 
countries, however, government can hardly be wholly 
neutral, and, whatever the law, if European land-hold- 
ers be encouraged, they will come; if discouraged, 
they will stop away. From India they stop away, 
while such as do reach Hindostan are known in offi- 
cial circles by the significant name of *' interlopers." 

Under a healthy social system, which the presence 
of English planters throughout India, and the support 
which would thus be given to the unofficial press, would 
of itself do rriuch to create, the owning of land by Eu- 
ropeans could produce nothing but good. The danger 
of the use of compulsion toward the natives would not 
exist, because in India — unlike what is the case in 
Dutch Java — the interest of the ruling classes would 
be the other way. If it be answered that, once in 
possession of the land, the Europeans would get the 
government into their own hands, we must reply that 
they could never be sufficiently numerous to have the 
slightest chance of doing anything of the kind. As 
we have seen in Ceylon, the attempt on the part of the 
planters to usurp the government is sternly repressed 



COL ONIZA TION. 221 

by the English people, the moment that its true bear- 
ing is understood, and yet in Ceylon the planters are 
far more numerous in proportion to the population 
than they can ever be in India, where the climate of 
the plains is fatal to European children, and where 
there is comparatively little land upon the hills; while 
in Ceylon the coffee-tracts, which are mountainous and 
healthy, form a sensible proportion of the whole lands 
of the island. It is true that the press, when once 
completely in the planters' hands, may advocate their 
interests at the expense of those of the natives, but in 
the case of Queensland we have seen that this is no 
protection to the planters against the inquisitive home 
eye, which would be drawn to India as it has been to 
Queensland by the reports of independent travelers 
and of interested but honest missionaries. 

The infamies of the foundation of the indigo-plan- 
tations in Bengal, and of many of the tea-plantations 
in Assam, in which violence was freely used to make 
the natives grow the selected crop, and in some cases 
the land actually stolen from its owners, have gone far 
to make European settlement in India a by-word among 
the friends of the Hindoo; but it is clear that an effi- 
cient police would suffice to restrain these illegalities 
and hideous wrongs. It might become advisable in 
the interest of the natives to provide that not only the 
officers, but also the sub-officers and some constables 
of the police, should be Europeans in districts where 
the plantations lay, great care being taken to select 
honest and fearless men, and to keep a strict watch on 
their conduct. 

The two great securities against that further degra- 
dation of the natives which has been foretold as a result 
of the expected influx of Europeans are the general 
teaching of the English language, and the grant of 

19* 



222 GEEATEB BRITAIN. 

perfect freedom of action (the government standing 
aloof) to mission iiries of every creed under heaven. 
The bestowal of the Enghsh tongue upon the natives 
will give the local newspapers a larger circulation 
among them than among the planter classes, and so, 
by the powerful motive of self-interest, force them to 
the side of liberty; while the honesty of some of the 
missionaries and the interest of others will certainly 
place the majority of the religious bodies on the side 
of freedom. It is needless to say that the success of a 
policy which would be opposed by the local press and 
at the same time by the chief English Churches is not 
an eventualitv about which we need ffive ourselves 
concern, and it is therefore probable that on the whole 
the encouragement of European settlement upon the 
plains would be conducive to the welfare of the native 
race. 

That settlement or colonization would make our 
tenure of India more secure is very doubtful, and, if 
certain, would be a point of little moment. It\ when 
India has passed through the present transition stage 
from a country of many peoples to a country oi only 
one, we cannot continue to rule her by the consent of 
the majority of her inhabitants, our occupation of the 
country must come to an end, whether we will or no. 
At the same time, the union of interests and community 
of ideas which would rise out of well-ordered settle- 
ment would do much to endear our government to the 
great body of the natives. As a warning against 
European settlement as it is, every Englishman should 
read the drama ''JSTil Darpa-n." 

During my stay at Simla, I visited a pretty fair in 
one of the neighboring valleys. There was much 
buffoonery and dancing — among other things, a sort of 
\ig by a fakeer, who danced himself into a tit, real or 



COLONIZATION. ^ 223 

pretended ; but the charm of this, as of all Hindoo 
gatherings, lay in the color. The women of the Pun- 
jaub dress very gayly for their fetes, wearing tight-fit- 
ting trowsers of crimson, blue, or yellow, and a long 
thin robe of white, or crimson-grounded Cashmere 
shawl ; bracelets and anklets of silver, and a nose-ring, 
either huge and thin, or small and nearly solid, com- 
plete the dress. 

At the fair were many of the Goorkhas (of whom 
there is a regiment at Simla), who danced, and seem- 
ingly enjoyed themselves immensely; indeed, the 
natives of all parts of India, from Nepaul to the Deccan, 
possess a most enviable faculty of amusement, and they 
say that there is a professional buffoon attached to 
every Goorkha regiment. Their full-dress is like that 
of the French chasseurs a 'pied, but in their undress 
uniform of white, the trowsers worn so tight as to 
wrinkle from stretching — these dashing little fellows, 
with their thin legs, broad shoulders, bullet heads, and 
flat faces, look extremely like a corps of jockeys. A 
general inspecting one of these regiments once said to 
the colonel : " Your men are small, sir." *' Their pay 
is small, sir ! " growled the colonel, in a towering passion. 

There were unmistakable traces of Buddhist archi- 
tecture in the little valley Plindoo shrine. Of the 
Chinese pilgrimages to India in the Buddhist period 
there are many records yet extant, and one of these, 
we are told, relates how, as late as the fourteenth 
century, the Emperor of China asked leave of the 
Delhi ruler to rebuild a temple at the southern base 
of the Himalayas, inasmuch as it was visited by his 
Tartar people. 



22i - GREATER BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE *' GAZETTE." 

Of all printed information upon India, there is none 
which, either for vahie or interest, can be ranked with 
that contained in the Government Gazette, which 
during my stay at Simla was published at that town, 
the Viceroy's Council having moved there for the hot 
weather. JSTot only are the records of the mere 
routine business interesting from their variety, but 
almost every week there is printed along with the 
Gazette a supplement, which contains memoranda from 
leading natives or from the representatives of the local 
governments upon the operations of certain customs, 
or on the probable effects of a proposed law, or similar 
communications. Sometimes the circulars issued by 
the government are alone reprinted, " with a view to 
elicit opinions," but more generally the whole of the 
replies are given. 

It is difficult for English readers to conceive the 
number and variety of subjects upon which a single 
number of the Gazette will give information of some 
kind. The paragraphs are strung together in the 
order in which they are received, without arrange- 
ment or connection. ''A copy of a treaty with his 
Highness the Maharajah of Cashmere" stands side by 
side with a grant of three months' leave to a lieu- 
tenant of Bombay Native Foot; while above is an ac- 
count of the suppression of the late murderous outrages 
in the Punjaub, and below a narrative of the upsetting 



THE ''GAZETTE:' 225 

of the Calcutta mails into a river near Jubbelpore. " A 
khureta from the Viceroy to his HighneBS the liao 
Oomaid Singh Bahadoor" orders him to put down 
crime in his dominions, and the humble answer of the 
Kao is printed, in which he promises to do his best. 
Paragraphs are given to "the floating dock at Ran- 
goon;" ''the disease among mail horses;" "the Suez 
Canal ;" "the forests of Oude;" and " polygamy among 
the Hindoos." The Viceroy contributes a " note on the 
administration of the Khetree chieftainship;" the 
Bengal government sends a memorandum on " bribery 
of telegraph clerks;" and the Resident of Kotah an 
official report of the ceremonies attending the recep- 
tion of a viceregal khureta restoring the honors of a 
salute to the Maha Rao of Kotah. The khureta was 
received in state, the letter being mounted alone upon 
an elephant magnificently caparisoned, and saluted 
from the palace with 101 guns. There is no honor 
that we can pay to a native prince so great as that of 
increasing his salute, and, on the other hand, when 
the Guicodar of Baroda allows a suttee, or when Jung 
Bahadoor of ISTepaul expresses his intention of visiting 
Paris, we punish them by docking them of two guns, 
or abolishing their salute, according to the magnitude 
of the offense. 

An Order in Council confers upon the High Priest 
of the Parsees in the Deccan, "in consideration of 
hie services during the mutiny of 1857," the honorary 
title of "Khan Bahadoor." A paragraph announces 
that an official investigation has been made into the 
supposed desecration by Scindia and the Viceroy of a 
mosque at Agra, and that it has been found that the 
place in question was not a mosque at all. Scindia had 
given an entertainment to the Viceroy at the Taj 
Mahal, and supper had been laid out at a building in 



226 GREATER BRITAIN. 

the grounds. The native papers said the building was 
a mosque, but the Agra officials triumphantly demon- 
strated that it had been used for a supper to Lord El- 
lenborough after the capture of Cabool, and that its 
name meant "Feast-place." "Report on the liglit- 
houses of the Abyssinian coast;" "'Agreement with 
the Gov^ernor of Leh," Thibet, in reference to the 
trans-Himalaj'an caravans; the promotion of one gen- 
tleman to be " Commissioner of Coorg," and of another 
to be "Superintendent of the teak forests of Lower 
Burmah;" "Evidence on the proposed measures to 
suppress the abuses of polyandry in Travancore and 
Cochin (by arrangement with the Rajah of Travan- 
core);" "Dismissal of Policeman Juggernauth Ram- 
kam — Oude division, JS^o. 11 company — for gross mis- 
conduct;" "Report on the Orissa famine;" "Plague 
in Turkey;" "Borer insects in coftee-plantations;" 
" Presents to gentlemen at Fontainebleau for teaching 
forestry to Indian officers;" "Report on the Cotton 
States of America," for the information of native 
planters; "Division of Calcutta into postal districts" 
(in Bengalee as well as English); "Late engagement 
between the Punjaub cavalry and the Afghan tribes;" 
"Pension of 3rs, per mensem to the widow (aged 12) 
of Jamram Chesa, Sepoy, 27th Bengal IST. L," are other 
headings. The relative space given to matters of im- 
portance and to those of little moment is altogether in 
tavor of the latter. The government of two millions 
of people is transferred in three lines, but a page is 
taken up with a list of the caste-marks and nose borings 
of native women applying for pensions as soldiers' 
widows, and two pages are full of advertisements of 
lost currency notes. 

The columns of the Gazette, or at all events its sup- 
plements, oifer to government officials whose opinion 



I 



THE '' gazette:' 227 

has bren asked upon questions on which they possess 
valuaDIe knowledge, or in which the people of their 
district are concerned, an opportunity of attacking the 
acts or laws of the government itself — a chance of 
which they are not slow to take advantage. One cov- 
ertly attacks the license-tax; a second, under pre- 
tense of giving his opinion on some proposed change 
in the contract law, backs the demands of the indigo- 
planters for a law that shall compel specific perform- 
ance of labor-contracts on the part of the workman, 
and under penalty of imprisonment; another lays all 
the ills under which India can be shown to sufi[er at 
the door of the home government, and points out the 
ruinous effects of continual chans^es of Indian Secre- 
taries in London. " 

It would be impossible to overrate the importance 
of the supplements to the Gazette^ viewed either as a 
substitute for a system of communicated articles to the 
native papers, or as material for English statesmen, 
whether in India or at home, or as a great experiment 
in the direction of letting the people of India legis- 
late for themselves. The results of no less than three 
government inquiries were printed in the supplement 
during my stay in India, the first being in the shape 
of a circular to the various local governments request- 
ing their opinion on the proposed extension to natives 
of the testamentary succession laws contained in the 
Indian Civil Code: while the second related to the 
*' ghaut murders," and the third to the abuses of po- 
lygamy among the Hindoos. The second and third 
inquiries were conducted by means of circulars ad- 
dressed by government to those most interested, 
whether native or European. 

The evidence in reply to the ^' ghaut murder" circu- 
lar w^as commenced by a letter from the Secretary to 



228 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

the government of Bengal to the Secretary to the gov- 
ernment of India, calling the attention of the Viceroy 
in Council to an article written in Bengalee by a Hin- 
doo in the Dacca Prokash on the practice of taking sick 
Hindoos to the river-side to die. It appears from this 
letter that the local governments pay careful attention 
to the opinions of the native papers — unless, indeed, 
we are to accept the view that "the Hindoo" was a 
government clerk, and the article written to order — a 
supposition favored by its radical and destructive tone. 
The Viceroy answered that the local officers and na- 
tive gentlemen of all shades of religious opinion were 
to be privately consulted. A confidential communica- 
tion was then addressed to eleven English and four 
Hindoo gentlemen, and the opinions of the English 
and native newspapers were unofficially invited. The 
Europeans were chiefly for the suppression of the 
practice; the natives — with the exception of one, who 
made a guarded reply — stated that the abuses of the 
custom had been exaggerated, and that they could not 
recommend its suppression. The government agreed 
with the natives, and decided that nothing should be 
done — an opinion in which the Secretary of State con- 
curred. 

In his reply to the "ghaut murder" circular, the 
representative of the orthodox Hindoos, after point- 
ing out that the Dacca Prokash is the Dacca organ of 
the Brahmos, or Bengal Deists, and not of the true 
Hindoos, went on to quote at length from the Hindoo 
scriptures passages which show that to die in the 
Ganges water is the most blessed of all deaths. The 
quotations were printed in native character as well 
as in English in the Gazette, One of the officials in 
his reply pointed out that the discouragement of a 
custom was often as effective as its prohibition, and 



THE ''GAZETTED 229 

instanced the cessation of the practice of " hook-swing- 
ing" and "self-mutilation." 

Valuable as is the correspondence as a sample of 
the method pursued in such inquiries, the question 
under discussion has not the importance that attaches 
to the examination into the abuses of the practice of 
polygamy. 

To prevent an outcry that the customs of the Hindoo 
people were being attacked, the Lieutenant-Governor 
of Bengal stated in his letters to the government of 
India that it was his wish that the inquiry should be 
strictly confined to the abuses of Koolin polygamy, 
and that there should be no general examination into 
ordinary polygamy, which was not opposed even by 
enlightened Hindoos. The polygamy of the Koolin 
Brahmins is a system of taking a plurality of wives as 
a means of subsistence: the Koolins were originally 
Brahmins of peculiar merit, and such was their sanc- 
tity that there grew up a custom of payments being 
made to them by the^ fathers of the forty or fifty women 
whom they honored by marriage. So greatly has the 
custom grown that Koolins have sometimes as many 
as eighty wives, and the husband's sole means of sub- 
sistence consists in payments from the fathers of his 
wives, each of whom he visits, however, only once in 
three or four years. The Koolin Brahmins live in 
luxury and indolence, their wives exist in misery, and 
the whole custom is plainly repugnant to the teach- 
ings of the Hindoo scriptures, and is productive of 
vice and crime. The committee appointed for the 
consideration of the subject by the Lieutenant-Gov- 
ernor of Bengal — which consisted of two English ci- 
vilians and five natives — reported that the suggested 
systems of registration of marriages, or of fines in- 
creasing in amount for every marriage after the first, 
VOL. II. 20 



230 GEE ATE E BEIT AIM. 

would limit the general liberty of the Hindoos to take 
njan}^ wives, which they were forbidden to touch. On 
the other hand, to recommend a declaratory law^ on 
plural marriages w^ould be to break their instructions, 
which ordered them to refrain from giving the sanc- 
tion of English law to Hindoo polygamy. One native 
dissented from the report, and favored a declaratory 
law. 

The English idea of "not recognizing" customs or 
religions which exist among a large number of the 
inhabitants of English countries is a strange one, and 
productive of much harm. It is not necessary, indeed, 
that w^e should countenance the worship of Jugger- 
nauth by ordering our officials to present offerings at 
his shrine, but it is at least necessary that we should 
recognize native customs by legislating to restrain them 
within due limits. To refuse to ''recognize" polyg- 
amy, which is the social state of the vast majority of 
the citizens of the British Empire, is not less ridiculous 
than to refuse to recognize that Hindoos are black. 

Recognition is one thing, interference another. How 
far we should interfere with native customs is a ques- 
tion upon which no general rule can be given, unless 
it be that we should in all cases of proposed interfer- 
ence with social usages or religious ceremonies consult 
intelligent but orthodox natives, and act up to their 
advice. In Ceylon, we have prohibited polygamy and 
polyandry, although the law is not enforced; in India, 
we " unofficially recognize" the custom; in Singapore, 
we have distinctly recognized it by an amendment to 
the Indian Succession Law, which there applies to 
natives as well as Europeans. In India, we put down 
suttee ; while, in Australia, we tolerate customs at least 
as barbarous. 

One of the social systems which we recognize in 



THE '' gazette:' 231 

India is far more revolting to our Englisli feelings 
than is that of polygamy — namely, the custom of poly- 
andry, under which each woman has many husbands 
at a time. This custom we unofficially recognize as 
completely as we do polygyny, although it prevails 
only on the Malabar coast, and among the hill-tribes 
of the Himalaya, and not among the strict Hindoos. 
The Thibetan frontier tribes have a singular form ol 
the institution, for with them the woman is the wife 
of all the brothers of a family, the eldest brother choos- 
ing her, and the eldest son succeeding to the property 
of his mother and all her husbands. In Southern 
India, the polyandry of the present day differs little 
from that which in the middle of the fifteenth century 
!N"iccolo de Conti found flourishing in Calicut. Each 
woman has several husbands, some as many as ten, 
who all contribute to her maintenance, she living apart 
from all of them ; and the children are allotted to the 
husbands at the will of the wife. 

The toleration of polygyny, or common polygamy, 
is a vexed question everywhere. In India, all author- 
ities are in favor of respecting it; in I^atal, opinion is 
the other way. While we suppress it in Ceylon, even 
among black races conquered by us with little pretext 
only fifty years ago, we are doubtful as to the propriety 
of its suppression by the United States among white 
people, who, whatever was the case with the original 
leaders, have for the most part settled down in Utah 
since it has been the territory of a nation whose 
imperial laws prohibit polygamy in plain terms. 

The inquiries into the abuses of polygamy which 
have lately been conducted in Bengal and in E^atal 
have revealed singular differences between the polyg- 
amy of the Hindoos and of the hill-tribes, between 
Indian and Mormon polygamy, and between both and 



2.32 GREATER BRITAIN. 

the Mohammedan law. The Hindoo laws, while they 
limit the number of legal wives, allow of concubines, 
and, in the Maharajah case, Sir Joseph Arnould went 
so far as to say that polygamy" and courtesanship are 
always found to flourish side by side, although the re- 
verse is notoriously the case at Salt Lake City, where 
concubinage is punishable, in name at least, by death. 
Again, polygamy is somewhat discouraged by Moham- 
medan and Hindoo laws, and the latter even lay down 
the sura which in many cases is to be paid to the lirst 
wife as compensation for the wrong done her by the 
taking of other wives. Among the Mormons, on the 
other hand, polygamy is enjoined upon the faithful, 
and, so far from feeling herself aggrieved, the first wife 
herself selects the others, or is at the least consulted. 
Among some of the hill-tribes of India, such as the 
Paharis of Bhaugulpoor, polygamy is encouraged, but 
with a limitation to four wives. 

Among the Mohammedans, the number of marriages 
is restricted, and divorce is common ; among the Mor- 
mons, there is no limit — indeed, the more wives the 
greater a man's glory — and divorce is ail-but unknown. 
The greatest, however, of all the many diflferences be- 
tween Eastern and Mormon polygamy lies in the fact 
that, of the Eastern wives, one is the chief, while 
Mormon wives are absolutely equal in legitimacy and 
rank. 

Not only is equality the law, but the first wife has 
recognized superiority of position over the others in 
the Mormon family. By custom she is always con- 
sulted by her husband in reference to the choice of a 
new wife, while the other wives are not always asked 
for their opinion; but this is a matter of habit, and the 
husband is in no way bound by her decision. Again, 
the first wife — if she is a consenting party — often gives 



UMRITSUR. 233 

away the fresh wives at the altar; but this, too, is a 
mere custom. The fact that in India one of the wivesj 
generally occupies a position of far higher dignity than 
that held by the others will make Indian polygamy 
easy to destroy by the lapse of time and operation of 
social and moral causes. As the city-dwelling natives 
come to mix more with the Europeans, they will find 
that only one of their wives will be generally recog- 
nized. This will tend of itself to repress polygamy 
among the wealthy native merchants and among the 
rajahs who are members of our various councils, and 
their example will gradually react upon the body of the 
natives. Already a majority of the married people ot 
India are monogamists by practice, although polygam- 
ists in theory; their marriages being limited by poverty, 
although not by law. The classes which have to be 
reached are the noble families, the merchants, and the 
priests ; and over the two former European influence 
is considerable, while the inquiry into Koolinism has 
proved that the leading natives will aid us in repress 
ing the abuses of polygamy among the priests. 



CHAPTER X. 

UMRITSUR. 



At XJmbala, I heard that the Sikh pilgrims return- 
ing from the sacred fair, or great Hindoo camp-meet- 
ing, at Hurdwar, had been attacked by cholera, and 
excluded from the town ; and as I quitted XJmbala in 
the evening, I came upon the cholera-stricken train of 
pilgrims escaping by forced marches toward their 

20* 



23'i QBE ATE R BRITAIN. 

horifes, in many cases a thousand miles away. Tall, 
lithe, long-bearded men with large hooked noses, high 
foreheads, and thin lips, stalked along, leading by one 
hand their veiled women, who ran behind, their crim- 
son and orange trowsers stained with the dust of travel, 
while bullock-carts decked out with jingling bells bore 
the tired and the sick. Many children of all ages 
were in the throng. For mile after mile I drove 
through their ranks, as they marched with a strange 
kind of weary haste, and marched, too, with few halts, 
with little rest, if any. One great camp we left behind 
us, but only one ; and all night long we were still pass- 
ing ranks of marching men and women. The march 
was silent; there was none of the usual chatter of an 
Indian crowd ; gloom was in every face, and the people 
marched like a beaten army flying from a destroying 
foe. 

The disease, indeed, was pressing on their heels. 
Two hundred men and women, as I was told at the 
Umbala lines, had died among them in the single day. 
Many had dropped from fright alone, but the pestilence 
was in the horde, and its seeds were carried into what- 
ever villages the pilgrims reached. 

The gathering at Hurdwar had been attended by a 
miHion people drawn from every part of the Punjaub 
and Northwest; not onl}' Hindoos and Sikhs, but 
Scindhees, Beloochees, Pathans, and Afghans had their 
representatives in this great throng. As we neared 
the bridge of boats across the Sutlej, I found that a 
hurried quarantine had been set up on the spot. Only 
the sick or dying and bearers of corpses were detained, 
however ; a few questions were asked of the remainder, 
and ultimately they were allowed to cross ; but driving 
on at speed, I reached Jullundur in the morning, only 
to find that the pilgrims had been denied admittance 



UMRITBUR. 235 

to the town. A camp had been formed without the 
city, to which the pilgrims had to go, unless they pre- 
ferred to straggle on along the roads, dropping and 
dying by the way; and the villagers throughout the 
country had risen on the wretched people, to prevent 
them returning to their homes. 

It is not strange that the government of India should 
lately have turned its attention to the regulation or 
suppression of these fairs, for the city-dwelling people 
of North India will not continue long to tolerate enor- 
mous gatherings at the commencement of the hot 
weather, by which the lives of thousands must ulti- 
mately be lost. At Ilurdwar, at Juggernauth, and at 
many other holy spots, hundreds of thousands — mil- 
lions, not unfrequently — are collected yearly from all 
parts of India. Great princes come down traveling 
slowly from their capitals with trains of troops and fol- 
lowers so long that they often take a day or more to 
pass a given spot. The Maharajah of Cashmere's camp 
between Kalka and Umbala occupied when I saw it 
more space than that of Aldershot. Camels, womeny 
sutlers without count, follow in the train, so that a 
body of five thousand men is multiplied until it occupies 
the space and requires the equipments of a vast army. 
A huge multitude of cultivators, of princes, of fakeers, 
and of roisterers met for the excitement and the 
pleasures of the camp is gathered about the holy spot. 
There is religion, and there is trade ; indeed, the re- 
ligious pilgrims are for the most part shrewd traders, 
bent on making a good profit from their visit to the 
fair. 

The gathering at Hurdwar in 1867 had been more 
than usually well attended and successful, when sud- 
denly a rumor of cholera was heard ; the police pro- 
cured the break-up of the camp, and government 



236 GREATER BRITAIN. 

thought lit to prohibit the visit to Simla ot the Mahara- 
jah of Cashmere, The pilgrims had hardly left the 
camp upon their journey home when cholera broke 
out, and by the time I passed them hundreds were 
already dead, and a panic had spread through India. 
The cholera soon followed the rumor, and spread even 
to the healthiest hill-towns, and 6000 deaths occurred 
in the city of Srinuggur, after the Maharajah's return 
with his infected escort from Hurdwar. A government 
which has checked infanticide and suppressed suttee 
could not fail to succeed, if it interfered, in causing 
these fairs to be held in the cold weather. 

At Jullundur I encountered a terrible dust-storm. 
It came from the south and west, and, to judge from 
its fierceness, must have been driven before the wind 
from the great sandy desert of ll^Torthern Scinde. The 
sun was rising for a sultry day, wdien from the south 
there came a blast which in a minute covered the sky 
with a leaden cloud, while from the horizon there ad- 
vanced, more slowly, a lurid mass of reddish-brown. 
It soon reached the city, and then, from the wall where 
I sought shelter, nothing could be seen but driving 
sand of ocher color, nothing heard but the shrieking 
of the wind. The gale ceased as suddenly as it began, 
but left a day which, delightful to travelers upon the 
Indian plains, would elsewhere have been called by 
many a hard name — a day of lowering sky and drop- 
ping rain, with chilling cold — in short, a day that felt 
and looked like an English thaw, though the ther- 
mometer must have stood at 75°. Another legacy 
from the storm was a view of the Himalayas such as 
is seldom given to the dwellers on the plaius. Look- 
ing at the clouds upon the northern horizon, I suddenly 
caught sight of the Snowy Range hanging, as it seemed, 
above them, half-way up the skies. Seen with a fore- 



UMRITSUR. 237 

ground of dawk jungle in bright bloom, tlie scene was 
beautiful ; but the view too distant to be grand, except 
through the ideas of immensity called up by the lofti- 
ness of the peaks. While crossing the Beeas (the an- 
cient Ilyphasis, and eastern boundary of the Persian 
empire in the daj^s of Darius), as I had crossed the 
Sutlej, by a bridge of boats, I noticed that the railway 
viaduct, which was being built for the future Umritsur 
and Delhi line, stood someway from the deep water of 
the river; indeed, stood chiefly upon dry land. The 
rivers change their course so often that the Beeas and 
Sutlej bridges will each have to be made a mile long. 
There has lately been given us in the Punjaub a sin- 
gular instance of the blind confidence in which gov- 
ernment orders are carried out by the subordinates. 
The order was that the iron columns on which the 
Beeas bridge was to rest should each be forty-five feet 
long. In placing them, in some cases the bottom of 
the forty-five feet was in the shifting sand — in others, 
it was thirty feet below the surface of the solid rock; 
but a boring which was needless in the one case and 
worse than useless in the other has been persevered in 
to the end, the story runs, because it was the " hook'm " 
The Indian rivers are the great bars to road and rail- 
way making; indeed, except on the Grand Trunk road, 
it may be said that the rivers of India are still un- 
bridged. On the chief mail-roads stone causeways are 
built across the river-beds, but the streams are ail-but 
impassable during the rains. Even on the road from 
Kalka to Umbala, however, there is one river-bed with- 
out a causeway, across which the dawk-gharree is 
dragged by bullocks, who struggle slowly through the 
sand ; and, in crossing it, I saw a steam-engine lyinsj 
half buried in the drift. 
In India, we have been sadly neglectful of the roads. 



238 GREATER BRITAIN. 

The Grand Trunk road and the few great raih'oads are 
the only means of communication in the country. 
Even between the terminus of the Bengal lines at 
Jubbelpore and of the Bombay railroad at Nagpore 
there was at the time of my visit no metaled road, 
although the distance w^as but 200 miles, and the mails 
ah'eady passed that way. Half a day at least was lost 
upon all the Calcutta letters, and Calcutta passengers 
for Bombay or England were put to an additional ex- 
pense of some <£30 and a loss of a week or ten days in 
time from the absence of 200 miles of road. Until we 
have good cross-roads in India, and metaled roads into 
the interior from 'every railway station, we shall never 
succeed in increasing the trade of India, nor in civil- 
izing its inhabitants. The Grand Trunk road is, how- 
ever, the best in the world, and is formed of soft white 
nodules, found in beds through North India, which 
when pounded and mixed with water is known as 
" kunkur," and makes a road hard, smooth, clean, and 
lastiug, not unlike to that which asphalt gives. 

At Umritsur I first found myself in the true East — 
the East of myrtles, roses, and veiled figures with flash- 
ing eyes — the East of the "Arabian Nights" and "Lalla 
Rookh." The city itself is Persian, rather than Indian, 
in its character, and is overgrown with date-palms, 
pomegranates, and the roses from which the precious 
attar is distilled. Umritsur has the making of the 
attar for the world, and it is made from a rose which 
blossoms only once a year. Ten tons of petals of the 
ordinary country rose [Rosa ceniifolia) are used annually 
in attar-making at Umritsur, and are worth from .£20 
to £30 a ton in the raw state. The petals are placed 
in the retort with a small quantity of w^ater, and heat 
is applied until the water is distilled through a hollow 
bamboo into a second vessel, which contains sandal- 



UMRITSUR. 239 

wood oil. A email quantity of pure attar passes with 
the water into the receiver. The contents of the re- 
ceiver are then poured out, and allowed to stand till 
the attar rises to the surface, in small globules, and 
is skimmed off. The pure attar sells for its weight in 
silver. 

Umritsur is famous for another kind of merchandise 
more precious even than the attar. It is the seat of 
the Cashmere shawl trade, and three great French 
firms have their houses in the town, where, through 
the help of friends, shawls may be obtained at singu- 
larly low prices; but travelers in far-off regions are 
often in the financial position of the Texan hunter who 
was offered a million of acres for a pair of boots — they 
*' have not got the boots." 

It is only shawls of the second class that can be 
bought cheap at Umritsur; those of the finest quality 
vary in price from X40 to <£250, X30 behig the cost of 
the material. The shawl manufacture of the Punjaub 
is not confined to Umritsur; there are 900 shawl- 
making shops in Loodiana, I was told while there. 
There are more than sixty permanent dyes in use at 
the Umritsur shawl-shops; cochineal, indigo, log- 
wood, and saffron are the commonest and best. The 
shawls are made of the down which underlies the hair 
of the "shawl-goat" of the higher levels. The yak, 
the camel, and the dog of the Himalayas, all possess 
this down as well as their hair or wool ; it serves them 
as a protection against the winter cold. Chogas — long 
cloaks used as dressing-gowns by Europeans — are also 
made in Umritsur, from the soft wool of the Bokhara 
camel, for Umritsur is now the headquarters of the 
Central Asian trade with Hindostan. 

The bazaar is the gayest and most bustling in 
India — the goods of all India and Central Asia are 



t 



240 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

there. Dacca muslin — known as *' woven air'* — lies 
side by side with thick chogas of kinkob and embroid- 
ered Cashmere, Indian towels of coarse huckaback 
haif cover Chinese watered silks, and the brilliant dyes 
of the brocades of Central India are relieved by the 
modest grays of the soft putioo caps. The buyers are 
as motley as the goods — Rajpoots in turbans of deep 
blue, ornamented with gold thread, Cashmere valley 
herdsmen in strange caps, nautch girls from the first 
three bridges of Srinuggur, some of the so-called *' hill- 
fanatics," whose only religion is to levy contributions 
on the people of the plains, and Sikh troopers, home 
on leave, stalking through the streets with a haughty 
swagger. Some of the Sikhs wear the pointed helmets 
of their ancestors, the ancient Sakee; but, whether he 
be helmeted or not, the enormous white beard of the 
Sikh, the fierce curl of his mustache, the cock of the 
turban, and the amplitude of his sash, all suggest the 
fighting-man. The strange closeness of the likeness 
of the Hungarians to the Sikhs would lead one to 
think that the ra^es are identical. 'Not only are they 
alike in build, look, and warlike habits, but they brush 
their beards in the same fashion, and these little cus- 
toms endure longer than manners — longer, often, than 
religion itself. One of the crowd was a ruddy-faced, 
red-bearded, Judas-haired fellow, that looked every 
inch a Fenian, and might have stepped here from the 
Kilkenny wilds; but the majority of the Sikhs had 
aquiline noses and fine features, so completely Jewish 
of the best and oldest type that I was reminded of 
Sir William Jones's fanciful derivation of the Afghan 
races from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. It may be 
doubted whether the Sikhs, Afghans, Persians, ancient 
Assyrians, Jews, ancient Scythians, and Magyars were 
not all originally of one stock. 



U MR IT SUE. 241 

In India, dress still serves the purpose of denoting 
rank. The peasant is clothed in cotton, the prince 
in cloth of gold; and even religion, caste, and occu- 
pation are distinguished by their several well-known 
and unchanging marks. Indeed, the fixity of fashion 
is as singular in Hindostan as its infinite changeable- 
ness in IN'ew York or France. The patterns we see 
to-day in the Bombay bazaar are those which were 
popular in the days of Shah Jehan. This regulation 
of dress by custom is one of the many difficulties 
in the way of our English manufacturers in their 
Indian ventures. There has been an attempt made 
lately to bring about the commercial annexation of 
India to England: Lancashire is to manufacture the 
Longee, Dhotee, and Saree, we are told ; Nottingham 
or Paisley are to produce us shumlas; Dacca is to 
give way to Norwich, and Coventry to supersede Jey- 
poor. It is strange that men of Indian knowledge 
and experience should be found who fail to point out 
the absurdity of our entertaining hopes of any great 
trade in this direction. The Indian women of the 
humbler castes are the only customers we can hope to 
have in India; the high- caste people wear only orna- 
mented fabrics, in the making of which native manu- 
facturers have advantages which place them out of the 
reach of European competition: cheap labor; work- 
men possessed of singular culture, and of a grace of 
expression which makes their commonest productions 
poems in silk and velvet; perfect knowledge of their 
customers' w^ants and tastes; scrupulous regard to 
caste conservatism — all these are possessed by the 
Hindoo manufacturer, and absent in the case of the 
firms of Manchester and Rochdale. As a rule, all 
Indian dress is best made by hand ; only the coarsest 
and least ornamented fabrics can be largely manu- 

VOL. II. 21 



242 GREATER BRITAIN. 

factured at paying rates in England. As for the 
clothing of the poorer people, the nnen for the most 
part wear nothing, the women little, and that little 
washed often, and changed never. Even for the 
roughest goods we cannot hope to undersell the native 
manufacturers by much in the presidency towns. Up 
country, if we enter into the competition, it can 
scarcely fail to be a losing one. England is not more 
unlikely to be clothed from India than India from 
Great Britain. If European machinery is needed, it 
will be erected in Yokohama, or in Bombay, not in 
the West Eiding. 

It is hardly to be believed that Englishmen have 
for some years been attempting to induce the natives 
to adopt our flower patterns — peonies, butterflies, and 
all. Ornament in India is always subordinate to the 
purpose which the object has to serve. Hindoo art 
begins where English ends. The principles which 
centuries of study have given us as the maxims upon, 
which the grammar of ornament is based are those 
which are instinctive in every native workman. Every 
costume, every vase, every temple and bazaar in India, 
gives eye-witness that there is truth in the saw that 
the finest taste is consistent with the deepest slavery of 
body, with the utmost slavishness of mind. A Hindoo 
of the lowest caste will spurn the gift of a turban or a 
loin-cloth the ornamentation of which consists not with 
his idea of symmetry and grace, l^othing could in- 
duce a Hindoo to clothe himself in such a gaudy, mas- 
querading dress as maddens a Maori with delight and 
his friends with jealousy and mortification. In art aa 
in deportment, the Hindoo loves harmony and quiet; 
and dress with the Oriental is an art: there is as muck 
feeling — as deep poetry — in the curves of the Hindoo 
Saree as in the outlines of the Taj. 



UMRITSUR. 243 

Uraritsur is the spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and 
the Durbar Temple in the center of the town is the 
holiest of their shrines. It stands, with the sunbeams 
glancing from its gilded roof, in the middle of a very 
holy tank, filled with huge weird fish-monsters that 
look as though they fed on men, and glare at you 
through cruel eyes. 

Leaving your shoes outside the very precincts of the 
tank, with the police guard that we have stationed 
there, you skirt one side of the water, and then leave 
the mosaic terrace for a still more gorgeous causeway, 
that, bordered on either side by rows of golden lamp- 
supporters, carries the path across toward the rich 
pavilion, the walls of which are as thickly spread with 
gems as are those of Akbar's palace. Here you are 
met by a bewildering din, for under the inner dome 
sit "vyorshipers by the score, singing with vigor the 
grandest of barbaric airs to the accompaniment of 
lyre, harp, and tomtom, while in the center, on a 
cushion, is a long-bearded gray old gooroo, or priest 
of the Sikh religion — a creed singularly pure, though 
little known. The efiect of the scene is much en- 
hanced by the beauty of the surrounding houses, whose 
oriel windows overhang the tank, that the Sikh princes 
may watch the evolutions of the lantern-bearing boats 
on nights when the temple is illuminated. When seen 
by moonlight, the tank is a very picture from the 
"Arabian Nights." 

This is a time of ferment in the Sikh relis^ion. A 
carpenter named Ram Singh — a man with all that 
combination of shrewdness and imagination, of enthu- 
siasm and worldliness, by which the world is governed 
— another Mohammed or Brigham Young, perhaps — 
has preached his way through the Punjaub, infusing 
his own energy into others, and has drawn away from 



244 GREATER BRITAIN. 

the Sikh Church some hundred thousand followers — 
reformers — who call themselves the Kookas. These 
modern Anabaptists — for many are disposed to look 
upon Ram Singh as another John of Leyden — bind 
themselves by some terrible and secret oath, and the 
government fear that reformation of religion is to be 
accompanied by reformation of the State of a kind not 
advantageous to the English power. When Ram Singh 
lately proclaimed liis intention of visiting the Durbar 
Temple, the gooroos incited the Sikh fanatics to at- 
tack his men with clubs, and the military police were 
forced to interfere. There is now, however, a Kooka 
temple at Lahore. 

In spite of religious ferment, there is little in the 
bazaar or temples of Umritsur to remind one of the 
times — only some twenty years ago — when the Sikh 
army crossed the Sutlej, and its leaders threatened to 
sack Delhi and Calcutta, and drive the English out of 
India; it is impossible, however, to believe that there , 
is no undercurrent in existence. Eighteen years cannot 
have sufficed to extino^uish the Sikh nationalitv, and 
the men ^vho beat us at Chillian wallah are not yet 
dead, or even old. When the Maharajah Dhuleep 
Singh returned from England in 1864 to bury his 
mother's body, the chiefs crowded round him as he 
entered Lahore, and besought him to resume his posi- 
tion at their head. His answer was a haughty ''Jao!'* 
("Begone!") If the Sikhs are to rise once more, they 
will look elsewhere for their leader. ( 



LAHORE, 245 



CHAPTER XL 

LAHORE. 

Crossing in a railway journey of an hour one of the 
most fertile districts of the Punjaub, I was struck with 
the resemblance of the country to South Australia: in 
each great sweeps of wheat-growing lands, with here 
and there an acacia or mimosa tree; in each a climate 
hot, but dry, and not unhealthy ; — singularly hot here 
for a tract in the latitude of Yicksburg, near which the 
Mississippi is sometimes frozen. 

Through groves of a yellow-blossomed, sweet-scented, 
weeping acacia, much like laburnum, in which the for- 
tified railway station seems out of place, I reached the 
tomb-surrounded garden that is called Lahore — a city 
of pomegranates, oleanders, hollyhocks, and roses. 
The date-groves of Lahore are beautiful beyond de- 
scription; especially so the one that hides the Agra 
Bank. 

Lahore matches Umritsur in the purity of its Orient- 
alism, Agra in the strength and grandeur of its walls: 
but it has no Tank Temple and no Taj ; the Great 
Mosque is commonplace, Runjeet Singh's tomb is 
tawdry, and the far-famed Shalimar Gardens inferior 
to those of Pinjore. The strangest sight of Lahore is 
its new railway station — a fortress of red brick, one of 
many which are rising all over India. The fortification 
of the railway stations is decidedly the next best step 
to that of having no forts at all. 

The city of Lahore is surrounded by a suburb of 

21* 



246 OREATER BRITAIN, 

great tombs, in which Europeans have in many casea 
taken up their residence by permission of the owner, 
the mausoleums being, from the thickness of their 
walls, as cool as cellars. Sometimes, however, a fanat- 
ical relative of the man buried in the tomb Avill warn 
the European tenant that he will die within a year — a 
prophecy which poison has once or twice brought to 
its fulfillment in the neighborhood of Lahore and at 
Moultan. 

Strolling in the direction of the Cabool Gate, I came 
on the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjaub, driving 
in an open carriage drawn by camels ; and passing out 
on to the plain, 1. met all the officers in garrison return- 
ing on Persian ponies from a game at the Afghan sport 
of '* hockey upon horseback,'^ while a little farther 
were some English ladies with hawks. Throughout 
the Northern Punjaub a certain settling down in com- 
fort on the part of the English officials is to be re- 
marked, and the adaptation of native habits to English 
uses, of which I had in one evening's walk the three 
examples which I have mentioned, is a sign of a tend- 
ency toward that making the best of things which in 
a newlv^-occupied country precedes the entrance upon 
a system of permanent abode. Lahore has been a Brit- 
ish city for nineteen j^ears, Bombay for two centuries 
and more ; yet Lahore is far more Euglish than Bombay, 

Although there are as yetiio signs of English settle- 
ment in the Punjaub, still the official community in 
many a Punjaub station is fast becoming colonial id 
its type, and Indian traditions are losing ground. Eng^ 
lish wives and sisters abound in Lahore, even the rail- 
way and canal officials having brought out their fam- 
ilies ; and during the cool w^eather race meetings, drag 
hunts, cricket matches, and croquet parties follow one 
another from day to day, and Lahore boasts a volun- 



LAHORE. 2il 

teer corps. When the hot season comes on, those who 
can escape to the hills, and the wives and children of 
those who cannot go, run to Dalhousie, as Londoners 
do to Eastbourne. 

The healthy English tone of the European communi- 
ties of Umritsur and Lahore is reflected in the news- 
papers of the Punjaub, which are the best in India, al- 
though the blunders of the native printers render the 
''betting news" unintelligible, and the ''cricket scores" 
obscure. The columns of the Lahore papers present 
as sino:ular a mixture of incono^ruous articles as even the 
Governme^nt Gazette offers to its readers. An official 
notice that it will be impossible to allow more than 
560 elephants to take part in the next Lucknow pro- 
cession follows a report of the "ice meeting" of the 
community of Lahore, to arrange about the next 
supply ; and side by side with this is an article on the 
Punjaub trade with Chinese Tartary, which recom- 
mends the government of India to conquer Afghanis- 
tan, and to reoccupy the valley of Cashmere. A para- 
graph notices the presentation by the Punjaub govern- 
ment to a native gentleman, who has built a serai at 
his own cost, of a valuable gift ; another records a 
brush with the Wagheers. The only police case is the 
infliction on a sweeper of a flne of thirty rupees for let- 
ting his donkey run against a high-caste woman, where- 
by she w^as defiled; but a European magistrate repri- 
mands a native pleader for appearing in court with his 
shoes on ; and a notice from the Lieutenant-Governor 
gives a list of the holidays to be observed by the courts, 
in which the "Queen's Birthday" comes between 
"Bhudur Kalee" and " Oors data Gunjbuksh," while 
"Christmas'" follows "Shubberat," and "Ash Wed- 
nesday" precedes "Holee." As one of the holidays 
lasts a fortnight, and many more than a week, the total 



248 GREATER BRITAIN. 

number of 6?ie5 non is considerable; but a postscript de- 
crees that additional local holidays shall be granted for 
fairs and festivals, and for the solar and lunar eclipse, 
which brings the no-court days up to sixty or seventy, 
besides those in the Long Vacation. The Hindoos are 
in the happy position of having also six new-year's 
days in every twelvemonth; but the editor of one of 
the Lahore papers says that his Mohammedan com- 
positors manifest a singular interest in Hindoo feasts, 
which shows a gratifying spread of toleration ! An 
article on the "Queen's English in Hindostan,'' in the 
Punjaub Times, gives, as a specimen of the poetry of 
Young Bengal, a serenade in which the skylark carols 
on the primrose bush. "Emerge, my love," the poet 
cries • 

*' The fragrant, dewy grove 
We'll wander through till gun-fire bids us part.'* 

But the final stanza is the best: 

" Then, Leila, come ! nor longer cogitate ; 
Thy egress let no scruples dire retard ; 
Contiguous to the portals of thy gate 
Suspensively I supplicate regard." 

The advertisements range from books on the lan- 
guages of Dardistan to government contracts for ele- 
phant fodder, or price-lists of English beer; and an 
announcement of an Afghan history in the Urdu tongue 
is followed by a prospectus of Berkhamstead Gram- 
mar School. King Edward would rub his eyes were 
he to wake and find himself being advertised in La- 
hore. 

The Punjaub Europeans, with their English news- 
papers and English ways, are strange governors for an 
empire conquered from the bravest of all Eastern races 
little more than eighteen years ago. One of them, 



OUR INDIAN ARMY. 249 

taking up a town policeman's staff, said to me, one day, 
" Who could have thought in 1850 that in 1867 we 
should be ruling the Sikhs with this?" 



CHAPTEK XII. 

OUR INDIAN ARMY. 

During my stay in Lahore, a force of Sikhs and 
Pathans was being raised for service at Hong Kong by 
an officer staying in the same hotel with myself, and a 
large number of men were being enlisted in the city 
by recruiting parties of the Bombay army. In all 
parts of India, we are now relying, so far as our native 
forces are concerned, upon the men who only a few 
years back were by much our most dangerous foes. 

Throughout the East, subjects concern themselves 
but little in the quarrels of their princes, and the 
Sikhs are no exception to the rule. They fought splen- 
didly in the Persian ranks at Marathon; under Shere 
Singh, they made their memorable stand at Chillian- 
wallah ; but, under Nicholson, they beat the bravest 
of the Bengal sepoys before Delhi. Whether they 
fight for us or against us is all one to them. They fight 
for those who pay them, and have no politics beyond 
their pockets. So far, they seem useful allies to us, 
who hold the purse of India. Unable to trust Hin- 
doos with arms, we can at least rule them by the em- 
ployment as soldiers of their fiercest enemies. 

When we come to look carefully at our system, ita 
morality is hardly clear. As we administer the reve- 
nues of India, nominally at least, for the benefit of the 



250 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Indian.5, it might be argued that we may fairly keep 
on foot such troops as are best fitted to secure her 
against attack ; but the argument breaks down when 
it is remembered that 70,000 British troops are main- 
tained in India from the Indian revenues for that pur- 
pose, and that local order is secured by an ample force 
of military police. Even if the employment of Sikhs 
in times of emergency may be advisable, it cannot be 
denied that the day has gone by for permanently over- 
awing a people by means of standing armies composed 
of their hereditary foes. 

In discussing the question of the Indian armies, we 
have carefully to distinguish between the theory and 
the practice. The Indian official theory says that not 
only is the native army a valuable auxiliary to the 
English army in India, but that its moral effect on the 
people is of great benefit to us, inasmuch as it raises 
their self-respect, and ofters a career to men who would 
otherwise be formidable enemies. The practice pro- 
claims that the native troops are either dangerous or 
useless by arming them with weapons as antiquated as 
the bow and arrow, destroys the moral efi'ect which 
might possibly be produced by a Hindoo force by fill- 
ing the native ranks with Sikh and Goorkha aliens and 
heretics, and makes us enemies without number by 
denying to natives that promotion which the theory 
holds out to them. The existing system is officially 
defended by the most contradictory arguments, and on 
the most shifting of grounds. Those who ask why we 
should not trust the natives, at all events to the extent 
of allowing Bengal and Bombay men to serve, and to 
serve with arms that they can use, in bodies which 
profess to be the Bengal and Bombay armies, but which 
in fact are Sikh regiments which we are afraid to arm, 
are told that the native army has mutinied times with- 



OUR INDIAN ABMY. 251 

out end, that it has never fought well except where, 
from the number of British present, it had no choice 
but to fight, and that it is dangerous and inefficient. 
Those who ask why this shadow of a native army 
should be retained are told that its records of distin- 
guished service in old times are numerous and splen- 
did. The huge British force maintained in India, and 
the still huger native army, are each of them made an 
excuse for the retention of the other at the existins: 
standard. If you say that it is evident that 70,000 
British troops cannot be needed in India, you are told 
that they are required to keep the 120,000 native troops 
in check. If you ask. Of what use, then, are the lat- 
ter? you hear that in the case of a serious imperial war 
the English troops would be withdrawn, and the de- 
fense of India confided to these very natives who in 
time of peace require to be thus severely held in check. 
Such shallow arguments would be instantly exposed 
were not English statesmen bribed by the knowledge 
that their acceptance as good logic allows us to main- 
tain at India's cost 70,000 British soldiers, who in time 
of danger would be available for our defense at home. 
That the English force of 70,000 men maintained in 
India in time of^eace can be needed there in peace or 
war is not to be supposed by those who remember that 
10,000 men were all that were really needed to suppress 
the wide-spread mutiny of 1857, and that Russia — our 
only possible enemy from without — never succeeded 
during a two years' war in her own territory in placing 
a disposable army of 60,000 men in the Crimea. 
Another mutiny such as that of 1857 is, indeed, impos- 
sible, now that we retain both forts and artillery 
exclusively in British hands; and Russia, having to 
bring her supplies and men across almost boundless 
deserts, or through hostile Afghanistan, would be i^et 



252 GREATER BRITAIN. 

at the Khjberby our whole Indian army, concentrated 
from the most distant stations at a few days' notice, 
lighting in a well-known and friendly country, and 
csupplied from the plains of all India by the railroads. 
Our English troops in India are sufficiently numerous, 
were it necessary, to fight both the Russians and our 
native army ; but it is absurd that we should maintain 
in India, in a time of perfect peace, at a yearly cost to 
the people of that country of from fourteen to sixteen 
millions sterling, an army fit to cope with the most 
tremendous disasters that could overtake the country, 
and at the same time unspeakably ridiculous that we 
should in all our calculations be forced to set down the 
native army as a cause of weakness. The native rulers, 
moreover, whatever their unpopularity with their 
people, were alw^ays able to array powerful levies 
against enemies from without; and if our government 
of India is not a miserable failure, our influence over 
the lower classes of the people ought, at the least, to 
be little inferior to that exercised by the Mogul emper- 
ors or the Maratta chiefs. 

As for local risings, concentration of our troops by 
means of the railroads that would be constructed in 
half a dozen years out of our military savings alone, 
and which American experience shows us cannot be 
effectually destroyed, would be amply sufficient to 
deal with them were the force reduced to 30,000 men ; 
and a general rebellion of the people of India we have 
no reason to expect, and no right to resist should it by 
any combination of circumstances be brought about. 

The taxation required to maintain the present Indian 
army presses severely upon what is in fact the poorest 
country in the world ; the 3'early drain of many thou- 
sand men weighs heavily upon us; and our system 
seeras tq proclaim to the world the humiliating fact, 



OUR INDIAN ARMY. 253 

that under British government, and in times of peace, 
the most docile of all peoples need an army of 200,000 
men, in addition to the military police, to watch them, 
or keep them down. 

Whatever the decision come to with regard to the 
details of the changes to be made in the Indian army 
system, it is at least clear that it will be expedient in 
us to reduce the English army in India if we intend it 
for India's defense, and our duty to abolish it if we in- 
tend it for our own. It is also evident that, after allow- 
ing for mere police dutief} — which should in all cases 
be performed hy men equipped as, and called by the 
name of, police — the native army should, whatever its 
size, be rendered as effective as possible, by instruc- 
tion in the use of the best weapons of the age. If 
local insurrections have unfortunately to be quelled, 
they must be quelled by English troops; and against 
European invaders, native troops, to be of the slightest 
service, must be armed as Europeans. As the pos- 
sibility of European invasion is remote, it would proba- 
bly be advisable that the native army should be gradu- 
ally reduced until brought to the point of merely 
supplying the body-guards and ceremonial-troops; at 
all events, the practice of overawing Sikhs with Hin- 
doos, and Hindoos with Sikhs, should be abandoned 
as inconsistent with the nature of our government in 
India, and with the first principles of freedom. 

Tliere is, however, no reason why we should wholly 
deprive ourselves of the services of the Indian warrior 
tribes. If we are to continue to hold such outposts 
as Gibraltar, the duty of defending them against all 
comers might not improperly be intrusted wholly or 
partly to the Sikhs or fiery little Goorkhas, on the 
ground that, while almost as brave as European troops, 
they are somewhat cheaper. It is possible, indeed 
VOL. II. 22 



254 GREATER BRITAIN. 

that, just as we draw our Goorkhas from independent 
^epaul, other European nations may draw Sikhs from 
us. We are not even now the only rulers who employ 
Sikhs in war; the Khan of Kokand is said to have 
n.any in his service: and, tightly ruled at home, the 
I unjaubees may not improbably become the Swiss of 
Asia. 

Whatever the European force to be maintained in 
India, it is clear that it should be local. The Queen's 
army system has now had ten years' trial, and has 
failed in every point in which failure was prophesied. 
The officers, hating India, and having no knowledge 
of native languages or customs, bring our government 
into contempt among the people; recruits in England 
dread enlistment for service they know not where; 
and Indian tax-payers complain that they are forced 
to support an army over the disposition of which they 
have not the least control, and which in time of need 
would probably be withdrawn from India. Even the 
Dutch, they say, maintain a purely colonial force in 
Java, and the French have pledged themselves that, 
when they withdraw the Algerian local troops, they 
will replace them by regiments of the line. England 
and Spain alone maintain purely imperial troops at 
the expense of their dependencies. 

Were the European army in India kept separate from 
the English service, it would be at once less costly and 
more efficient, while the officers would be acquainted 
with the habits of the natives and customs of the 
country, and not, as at present, mere birds of passage, 
careless of offending native prejudice, indifferent to 
the feelings of those among whom they have to live, 
and occupied each day of their idle life in heartily 
wishing themselves at home again. There are, indeed, 
to the existing system drawbacks more serious than 



RUSSIA. 255 

have been mentioned. Sufficient stress has not hitherto 
been laid upon the demoralization of our army and 
danger to our home freedom that must result from tlio 
keeping in India of half our regular force. It is hard 
to believe that men who have periodically to go through 
such scenes as those of 1857, or who are in daily con- 
tact with a cringing dark-skinned race, can in the long 
run continue to be firm friends to constitutional liberty 
at home ; and it should be remembered that the English 
troops in India, though under the orders of the Com- 
mander-in-Chief, are practically independent of the 
House of Commons. 

It is not only constitutionally that Indian rotation 
service is bad. The system is destructive to the dis- 
cipline of our troops, and a separate service is the only 
remedy. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

RUSSIA. 

For fifty years or more, we have been warned that 
one day we must encounter Russia, and for fifty years 
Muscovite armies, conquering their w^ay step by step, 
have been advancing southward, till we find England 
and Russia now ail-but face to face in Central Asia. 

Steadily the Russians are advancing. Their circular 
of 1864, in which they declared that they had reached 
their wished-for frontier, has been altogether forgotten^ 
and all Kokand, and portions of Bokhara, have been 
swallowed up, while our spies in St. Petersburg tell the 
Indian Council that Persia herself ia doomed. Ai- 



256 GREATER BRITAIN. 

though, liowever, the distance of the Russian from the 
English frontiers lias been greatly reduced of late, it is 
still far more considerable than is supposed. Instead 
of the Russian outposts being 100 miles from Peshawnr, 
as one alarmist has said, they are still 400; and Samar- 
cand, their nearest city, is 450 miles in a straight line 
over the summit of the Hindoo Koosh, and 750 by road 
from our frontier at the Kliyber. At the same time, 
we must, in our calculations of the future, assume that 
a few years will see Russia at the northern base of the 
Hindoo Koosh, and in a position to overrun Persia 
and take Herat. 

It has been proposed that we should declare to Rus- 
sia our intention to preserve Afghanistan as neutral 
ground ; but there arises this diHiculty, that, having 
agreed to this plan, Russia would immediately pmceed 
to set about ruling Afghanistan through Persia. On 
the other hand, it is impossible, as we have already 
found, to treat with Afghanistan, as there is no Afghan- 
istan with which to treat; nor can we enter into friendly 
relations with any Afi^han chief, lest his neiii^hbor and 
enemy should hold us responsible for his acts. If we 
are to have any dealings with the Afghans, we shall 
soon be forced to take a side, and necessarily to light 
and conquer, but at a great cost in men and money. 
It might be possible to make friends of some of the 
iVontier tribes by giving them lands within our borders 
on condition of their performing military service and 
respecting the lives and property of our merchants ; but 
the policy would be costly, and its results uncertain, 
while we should probably soon lind ourselves embroiled 
in Afghan politics. ^loreover, meddling in Afghan- 
istan, long since proved to be a foolish and a danger- 
ous course, can hardly be made a wise one by the fact 
of the Russians being at the gate. 



JRUSSIA. 257 

Many would have us advance to Herat, on the ground 
that it is in Afghanistan, and not on the plains of In- 
dia, that Russia must be met ; but such is the fierce- 
ness of the Afghans, such the poverty of their country, 
that its occupation would be at once a source of weak- 
ness and a military trap to the invader. Were we to 
occupy Herat, we should have Persians and Afghans 
alike against us; were the Russians to annex Afghan- 
istan, they could never descend into the plains of India 
without a little diplomacy, or a little money from us, 
bringing the Afghan fanatics upon their rear. When, 
indeed, we look carefully into the meaning of those 
Anglo-Indians who would have us repeat our attempt 
to thrash the Afghans into loving us, we find that the 
pith of their complaint seems to be that battles and con- 
quests mean promotion, and that we have no one left 
in India upon whom we can wage war. Civilians look 
for new appointments, military men for employment, 
missionaries for fresh fields, and all see their opening 
in annexation, while the newspapers echo the cry of 
their readers, and call on the Viceroy to annex Afghan- 
istan "at the cost of impeachment." 

Were our frontier at Peshawur a good one for defense, 
there could be but little reason shown for an occupation 
of any part of Afghanistan; but, as it is, the question 
of the desirability of an advance is complicated by the 
lamentable weakness of our present frontier. Were 
Russia to move down upon India, we should have to 
meet her either in Afghanistan or upon the Indus : to 
meet her at Peshawur, at the foot of the mountains 
and with the Indus behind us, would be a military 
suicide. Of the two courses that would be open to us, 
a retreat to the Indus would be a terrible blow to the 
confidence of our troops, and an advance to Cabool or 
Herat would be an advance out of reach of our railroad 

22* 



258 GREATER BRITAIN. 

communications, and throngh a dangerous defile. To 
maintain our frontier force at Peshawur, as we now do, 
\s to maintain in a pestilential valley a force which, if 
attacked, could not figbt where it is stationed, but 
would be forced to advance into Afghanistan or retreat 
to the Indus. Tlie best policy would probably be to 
withdraw the Europeans from Peshawur and Kawul 
Pindee, and place them upon the Indus in the hills 
near Attock, completing our railroad from Attoek to 
Lahore and from Attock to the hill station, and to 
leave the native force to defend the Khyber and Pesha- 
wur ao-ainst the mountain tribes. We should also 
encourage European settlement in the valley of Cash- 
mere. On the other hand, we should push a short 
railroad from the Indus to the Bholan Pass, and there 
concentrate a second powerful European force, with a 
view to resisting invasion at that point, and of taking 
in flank and rear any invader who might advance upon 
the Khyber. The Bholan Pass is, moreover, on the 
road to Candahar and Herat; and, although it would 
be a mistake to occupy those cities except by the wish 
of the Afghans, still the advance of the Russians will 
probably one day force the iVfghans to ally themselves 
to us and solicit the occupation of their cities. The 
fact that the present ruler of Herat is a mere tool ot 
the Persians or feudatory of the Czar will have no 
elFect whatever on his country, for if he once threw 
himself openly into Russian hands his people would 
immediately desert him. So much for the means of 
defense against the Russians, but there is some chaiice 
that we may have to defend India against another 
Mohammedan invasion, secretly countenanced, but not 
openly aided, by Russia. While on my way to England, 
I had a conversation on this matter with a well-informed 
Syrian Pacha, but notorious Russian-hater. He had 



BUSSIA. 259 

been telling me that Russian policy had not changed, 
but was now, as ever, a policy of gradual annexation ;. 
that she envied our position in India, and hated us 
because our gentle treatment of Asiatics is continually 
held up to her as an example. "Russia has attacked 
you twice in India, and will attack you there again," 
he said. Admitting her interference in the Afghan 
war, I denied that it was proved that she had any in- 
fluence in ilindostan, or any hand in the rebellion of 
1857. My friend made me no spoken answer, but 
took four caskets that stood upon the table, and, set- 
ting them in a row, with an interval between them, 
pushed the first so that it struck the second, the second 
the third, and the third the fourth. Then, looking up, 
he said, " There you have the manner of the Russian 
move on India. I push No. 1, but you see No. 4 
moves. 1 influences 2, 2 influences 3, and 3 influences 
4; but 1 doesn't influence 4. Oh, dear me, no! Very 
likely even 1 and 3 are enemies, and hate each other; 
and if 3 thought that she was doing I's work, she 
would kick over the traces at once. Nevertheless, she 
is doing it. In 1857, Russia certainly struck at you 
through Egypt, and probably through Central Asia 
also. Lord Palmerston was afraid to send troops 
through Egypt, though, if that could have been largely 
done, the mutiny could have been put down in half 
the time, and with a quarter the cost; and Nana Sahib, 
in his proclamation, stated, not without reason, that 
Egypt was on his side. The way you are being now 
attacked is this: — Russia and Egypt are for the mo- 
ment hand and glove, though their ultimate objects 
are conflicting. Egypt is playing for the leadership of 
all Islam, even of Moslems in Central Asia and India. 
Russia sees that this game is for the time her game, as 
through Egypt she can excite the Turcomans, Afghans, 



260 GREATER BRITAIN. 

and other Moslems of Central Asia to invade India in 
the name of religion and the Prophet, but, in fact, in 
the hope of plunder, and can also at the same time 
raise your Mohammedan population in Hindostan — a 
population over which you admit you have absolutely 
no hold. Of course you will defeat these hordes when- 
ever you meet them in the field; but their numbers 
are incalculable, and their bravery great. India has 
t\vice before been conquered from the north, from 
Central Asia, and you must remember that behind 
these hordes comes Russia herself. Mohammedanism 
is weak here, on the Mediterranean, I grant you ; but 
it is very strong in Central Asia — as strong as it ever 
was. Can you trust your Sikhs, too? I doubt it." 

When I asked the Pacha how Eg^^pt was to put her- 
self at the head of Islam, he answered: — "Thus. We 
Egyptians are already supporting the Turkish empire. 
Our tribute is a million (francs), but we pay five mil- 
lions, of which four go into the Sultan's privy purse. 
We have all the leading men of Turkey in our pay: 
30,000 of the best troops serving in Crete, and the 
whole of the fleet, are contributed by Egypt. Now, 
Egypt had no small share in getting up the Cretan 
insurrection, and yet, you see, she does, or pretends to 
do, her best to put it down. The Sultan, therefore, is 
at the Viceroy's mercy, if you don't interfere, l^o one 
else will if you do not. The Viceroy aims at being 
nominally, as he is really, 'the Grand Turk.* Once 
Sultan, with Crete and the other islands handed over 
to Greece or Russia, the present Viceroy commands 
tlie allegiance of every Moslem people — thirty millions 
of your Indian subjects included: that is, practically 
Russia commands that allegiance — Russia practically, 
though not nominally, at Constantinople wields the 
power of Islam, instead of being hated by every true 



RUSSIA. 261 

believer, as she would be if she annexed Turkey in 
Europe. Her real game is a far grander one than that 
with which she is credited." " Turkey is your vassal," 
the Pacha went on to say; "she owes her existence 
entirely to you. Why not use her, then ? Why not 
put pressure on the Sultan to exert his influence over 
the Asian tribes — which is far greater than you believe 
— for your benefit ? Why not insist on your Euphrates 
route? Why not insist on Egypt ceasing to intrigue 
against you, and annex the country if she continues 
in her present course? If you wish to bring matters 
to a crisis, make Abdul Aziz insist on Egypt being 
better governed, or on the slave-trade being put down. 
You have made your name a laughing-stock here. 
You let Egypt half bribe, half force Turkey into 
throwing such obstacles in the way of your Euphrates 
route that it is no nearer completion now than it ever 
was. You force Egypt to pass a law abolishing the 
slave-trade and slavery itself, and you have taken no 
notice of the fact that this law has never been enforced 
in so much as a single instance. You think that you 
are all right now that you have managed to force our 
government into allowing your troops to pass to and 
fro through Egypt, thus making your road through the 
territory of your most dangerous enemy. Where would 
you be in case of a war with Russia?" 

When I pleaded that, if we were refused passage, we 
should occupy the country, the Pacha replied: "Of 
course you would; but you need not imagine that 
you will ever be refused passage. What will happen 
will be that, just at the time of your greatest need, the 
floods will come down from the mountains and wash 
away ten miles of the line, and all the engines will go 
out of repair. You will complain; w^e shall ofl:er to 
lay the stick about the feet of all the emfloyes of the 



262 GREATER BRITAIN. 

line. "What more would yon have ? Can we prevent 
the floods? When our government wished to keep 
your Euphrates scheme from coming to anything, did 
they say : ' Do this thing, and we will raise Islam against 
you'? Oh no! they just bribed your surveyors to be 
attacked by the Bedouin, or they bribed a pacha to tell 
you that the water was alkaline and poisonous for the 
next hundred miles, and so on, till your company was 
ruined, and the plan at an end for some years. Your 
home government does not understand us Easterns. 
Why don't you put your Eastern affairs into the hands 
of your Indian government? You have two routes to 
India — Egypt and Euphrates valley, and both are prac- 
tically in the hands of your only great enemy — Russia." 
In all that my Syrian friend said of the danger 
of our relying too much upon our route across Egypt, 
and on the importance to us of the immediate con- 
struction of the Euphrates Valley Railway line, there 
is nothing but truth; but, in his fears of a fresh in- 
vasion of India by the Mohammedans, he forgot that 
for fighting purposes the Mohammedans are no longer 
one, but two peoples; for the Moslem races are 
divided into Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and 
dissenting Mohammedans, who hate each other far 
more fiercely than they hate us. Our Indian Moslems 
are orthodox, the Afghans and Persians are dissenters, 
the Turks are orthodox. If Egypt and Persia play 
Russia's game, we ma}' count upon the support of the 
Turks of Syria, of the Euphrates valley, and of India. 
To unite Irish Catholics and Orangemen in a religious 
crusade against the English would be an easy task by 
the side of that of uniting Sonnite and Shiite against 
India. A merely Shiite invasion is always possible, 
but could probably be met with ease, by opposition at 
the Khyber, and resistance upon the Indus, followed 



BUSSIA. 263 

by a rapid advance from the Bholan. Russia herself 
is not without her difficulties with the strictest and 
most fanatical Mohammedans. ]S"ow that she has con- 
quered Bokhara, their most sacred land, they hate 
her as fiercely as they hate us. The crusade, if she 
provokes it, may be upon our side, and British com- 
manders in green turbans may yet summon the Faith- 
ful to arms, and invoke the Prophet. 

It is to be remarked that men who have lived long 
in India think that our policy in the East has over- 
whelming claims on the attention of our home authori- 
ties.. ]^ot only is Eastern business to be performed, 
and Eastern intrigues watched carefull}^ but, accord- 
ing to these Indian flies, who think that their Eastern 
cart-wheel is the world. Oriental policy is to guide 
home policy, to dictate our European friendships, to 
cause our wars. 

]N'o Englishman in England can sympathize with 
the ridiculous inability to comprehend our real posi- 
tion in India which leads many Anglo-Indians to cry 
out that we must go to war wnth Russia to " keep up 
our prestige;" and, on the other hand, it need hardly 
be shown that, apart from the extension of trade and 
the improvement of communication, we need not 
trouble ourselves with alliances to strengthen us in the 
East. Supported by the native population, we can 
maintain ourselves in India against the world; unsup- 
ported by them, our rule is morally indefensible, and 
therefore not long to be retained by force of arms. 

The natives of India watch w^ith great interest the 
advance of Russia; not that they believe that they 
would be any better off under her than under us, but 
that they would like, at all events, to see some one 
thrash us, even if in the end they lost by it; just as a 
boy likes to see a new bully thrash his former master, 



261 GEEATER BRITAIN. 

even though the later be also the severer tyrant 
That the great body of the people of India watch 
with feverish excitement the advance of Rnssia is 
seen from the tone of the native press, which is also of 
service to us in demonstratins: that the mass of the 
Hindoos are incapable of appreciating the benefits, 
and even of comprehending the character, of our rule. 
They can undei^stand the strength which a steady 
purpose gives; they cannot grasp the principles which 
lie at the root of our half-mercantile, halt-benevolent 
despotism. 

No native believes that we shall permanently remain 
in India; no native really sympathized with us during 
the rebellion. To the people of India we English are 
a myster3\ We profess to love them, and to be edu- 
cating them for something they cannot comprehend, 
which we call freedom and self-government; in the 
mean time, while we do not plunder them, nor con- 
vert them forcibly, after the wont of the Mogul 
emperors, we kick and cutf them all round, and 
degrade the nobles by ameliorating the condition of 
humbler men. 

No mere policy of disarmament or of oppression can 
be worth much as a system for securing lasting peace, 
for if our Irish constabulary cannot prevent the intro- 
duction of Fenian arms to Cork and Dublin, how 
doubly impossible must it be to guard a frontier of 
Hy^ or six thousand miles by means of a police force 
which itself cannot be trusted! That prolonged dis- 
armament causes our subjects to forget the art of war 
is scarcely true, and if true would tell both ways. 
The question is not one of disarmament, and suppres- 
sion of rebellion: it is that of whether we can raise up 
in India a people that will support our rule; and if 
this is to be done, there must be an end of cuffing. 



RUSSIA. 265 

"Were the Hindoos as capable of appreciating the 
best points of our government as they are of pointing 
out the worst, we should have nothing to fear in com- 
parison with Russia. Drunken, dirty, ignorant, and 
corrupt, the Russian people are no lit rulers for Hin- 
dostan. Were our rival that which she pretends to 
be, — a civilized European Power with "a mission^' in 
the East; were she even, indeed, an enlightened com- 
mercial Power, with sufficiently benevolent instincts 
but with no policy outside her pocket, such as England 
was till lately in the East, and is still in the Pacilic, — 
•yve might find ourselves able to meet her with open 
arms, and to bring ourselves to believe that her ad- 
vance into Southern Asia was a gain to mankind. As 
it is, the Russians form a barbarous horde, ruled by a 
German emperor and a German ministry, who, how- 
ever, are as little able to suppress degrading drunken- 
ness and shameless venality as they are themselves 
desirous of promoting true enlightenment and educa- 
tion. ''Talk of Russian civilization of the East!" an 
Egyptian once said to me; ''wh}^ Russia is an organ- 
ized barbarism; why — the Russians are — why they 
are — why — nearly as bad as we are!" It should be 
remembered, too, that Russia, being herself an Asiatic 
power, can never introduce European civilization into 
Asia. All the cry of "Russia! Russia!" all this 
magnifying of the Russian power, only means that, the 
English being the strong men most hated by the weak 
men of Southern Asia, the name of the next strongest 
is used to terrify them. The offensive strength of 
Russia has been grossly exaggerated by alarmists, who 
forget that, if Russia is to be strong in Bokhara and 
Xhiva, it will be Bokharan and Khivan strength. In 
all our arguments we assume that with three-fourths 
of her power in Asia, and with her armies composed 
VOL. II. 23 



266 GREATER BRITAIN. 

of Asians, Russia will remain aEuropean Power. "What- 
ever the composition of her forces, it may be doubted 
whether India is not a stronger empire than her new 
neighbor. The military expenditure of India is equal 
to that of Russia; the homogeneousness of the North- 
ern Power is at the best inferior to that of India; 
India has twice the population of Russia, five times 
her trade, and as large a revenue. To the miserable 
military administration of Russia, Afghanistan would 
prove a second Caucasus, and by their conduct we see 
that the Afghans themselves are not terrified by her 
advance. The people with whom an Asiatic prince 
seeks alliances are not those whom he most fears. 
That the Afghans are continually intriguing with 
Russia against us, merely means that they fear us 
more than they fear Russia. 

Russia will one day find herself encountering the 
English or Americans in China, perhaps, but not upon 
the plains of Hindostan. Wherever and whenever the 
contest comes, it can have but one result. Whether 
upon India or on England falls the duty of defense, 
Russia must be beaten. A country that was fifty years 
conquering the Caucasus, and that could never place a 
disposable force of 60,000 men in the Crimea, need 
give no fear to India, while her grandest offensive 
efforts would be ridiculed by America, or by the Eng- 
land of to-day. To meet Russia in the way that we 
are asked to meet her means to meet her by corrup- 
tion, and a system of meddling Eastern diplomacy is 
proposed to us which is revolting to our English na- 
ture. Let us by all means go our own way, and let 
Russia go hers. If we try to meet the Russian Ori- 
entals with craft, we shall be defeated; let us meet 
them, therefore, with straightforwardness and friend- 
ship, but, if necessary, in arms. 



NA TIVE STA TES. 267 

It is not Russia that we need dread, but, by the de- 
struction of the various nationalities in Hindostan by 
means of centralization and of railroads, we have 
created an India which we cannot fight. India her- 
self, not Russia, is our danger, and our task is rather 
to conciliate than to conquer. 



CHAPTER XIY. 

NATIVE STATES. 

Quitting Lahore at night, I traveled to Moultan by 
a railway which has names for its stations such as 
India cannot match. Chunga-Munga, Wanrasharam, 
Cheechawutnee, and Chunnoo, follow one another in 
that order. During the night, when I looked out into 
the still moonlight, I saw only desert, and trains o\ 
laden camels pacing noiselessly over the waste sands ; 
but in the morning I found that the whole country 
within eye-shot was a howling wilderness. Moultan, 
renowned in warlike history from Alexander's time to 
ours, stands upon the edge of the great sandy tract 
once known as the "Desert of the Indies." In every 
village, bagpipes were playing through the livelong 
night. There are many resemblances to the Gaelic 
races to be found in India; the Hindoo girl's saree is 
the plaid of the Gal way peasantess, or of the Tron- 
gate fishwife; many of the hill-tribes wear the kilt; 
but the Punjaubee pipes are like those of the Italian 
pfiferari rather than those of the Scotch Highlander. 

The great sandy desert which lies between the Indus 
and Rajpootana has, perhaps, a future under British 



268 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

rule. Wherever snowy mountains are met with in 
warm countries, yearly floods, the product of the 
thaws, sweep down the rivers that take their rise in 
the glaciers of the chain, and the Indus is no excep- 
tion to the rule. Were the fall less great, the stream 
less swift, Scinde would have been another Cambodia, 
another Egypt. As it is, the fertilizing floods pour 
through the deep river-bed instead of covering the 
land, and the silt is wasted on the Arabian Gulf. IS'o 
native State with narrow boundaries can deal with the 
great works required for irrigation on the scale that 
can alone succeed; but, possessing as we do the coun- 
try from the defiles whence the five rivers escape into 
the plains to the sandy bars at which they lose them- 
selves in the Indian Seas, we might convert the Pun- 
jaub and Scinde into a garden which should support a 
happy population of a hundred millions, reared under 
our rule, and the best of bulwarks against invasion 
from the north and west. 

At Umritsur I had seen those great canals that are 
commencing to irrigate and fertilize the vast deserts 
that stretch to Scinde. At Jullundur I had already 
seen their handiwork in the fields of cotton, tobacco, 
and wheat that blossom in the middle of a wilderness; 
and if the whole Punjaub and Indus valley can be made 
what Jullundur is, no outlay can be too costly a means 
to such an end. There can be no reason why, with 
irrigation, the Indus valley should not become as fer- 
tile as the valley of the jN^ile. 

> After admiriug in Moultan, on the one hand, the 
grandeur of the citadel which still shows signs of the 
terrible bombardment which it sufi:ered at our hands 
after the murder by the Sikhs of Mr. Van Agnew in 
1848, and, on the other hand, the modesty of the sensi- 
tive mimosa which grows plentifully about the city, I 



NATIVE STATES. 269 

set off by railway for Slier Shah, the point at which 
the railway comes to its end upon the banks of the 
united Jhelum and Chenab, two of the rivers of the 
Punjaub. The railway company once built a station 
on the river-bank at Sher Shah, but the same summer, 
when the floods came down, station and railway alike 
disappeared into the Indus. Embanking the river is 
impossible, from the cost of the ^7orks which would be 
needed; and building wing-dams has been tried, with 
the remarkable effect of sending off the river at right 
angles to the dam to devastate the country opposite. 

The railway has now no station at Sher Shah, but 
the Indus-steamer captains pick out a good place to 
lie alongside the bank, and the rails are so laid as 
to bring the trains alongside the ships. After seeing 
nothing but flat plains from the time of leaving Um- 
ritsur, I caught sight from Sher Shah of the great 
Sooleiman chain of the Afghan Mountains, rising in 
black masses through the fiery mist that fills the Indus 
valley. 

I had so timed my arrival on board the river-boat 
that she sailed the next morning, and after a day's un- 
eventful steaming, varied by much running aground, 
when we anchored in the evening we were in the native 
State of Bhawulpore. 

While we were wandering about the river-shore in 
the evening, I and my two or three European fellow- 
travelers, we met a native, with whom one of our num- 
ber got into conversation. The Englishman had heard 
that Bhawulpore was to be annexed, so lie asked the 
native whether he was a British subject, to which the 
answer was to the efi'ect that he did not know. "To 
whom do you pay your taxes?" "To the govern- 
ment." "Which government? the English govern- 
ment or the Bhawulpore government?" His answer 

23* 



270 QBEATER BRITAIN. 

was that he did not care so long as he had to pay j 
them to somebody, and that he certainly did not 
know. 

Little as our Bhawulpore friend knew or cared ahout 
the color of his rulers, he was nevertheless, according 
to our Indian government theories, one of the people 
who ought to be most anxious for the advent of English 
rule. Such has been the insecurity of life in Bhawul- 
pore, that, of the six last viziers, hve have been mur- 
dered by order of the Khan, the last of all having been 
strangled in 1862; and no native State has been more 
notorious than Bhawulpore for the extravagance and 
gross licentiousness of the reigning princes. The rulers 
of Bhawulpore, although nominally controlled by us, 
have hitherto been absolute despots, and have fre- 
quently put to death their subjects out of mere whimsy. 
For years the country has been torn by ceaseless revo- 
lutions, to the ruin of the traders and the demoraliza- 
tion of the people; the taxes have been excessive, 
peculation universal, and the arliiy.has lived at free 
quarters. The Khans were for many years in such 
dread of attempts upon their lives, that every dish for 
their table was tasted by the cooks; the army was 
mutinous, all appointments bought and sold, and the 
Khans being Mohammedans, no one need pay a debt 
to a Hindoo. 

Bhawulpore is no exceptional case; everywhere we 
hear of similar deeds being common in native States. 
One of the native rulers lately shot a man for killing a 
tiger that the rajah had wounded; another flogged a 
subject for defending his wife; abduction, adultery, 
and sale of wives are common amons: them. Land is 
seized from its holders without compensation being so 
much as otfered to them; extortion, torture, and denial 
of justice are common, open venality prevails in all 



NATIVE STATES., 271 

ranks, and no native will take the pledged word of his 
king, while the revenues, largely made up of torced 
loans, are wasted on all that is most vile. 

In a vast number of cases, the reigning families have 
degenerated to such an extent, that the scepter has 
come into the hands of some mere driveler, whom, for 
the senselessness of his rule, it has at last been neces- 
sary to depose. Those who have made idiocy their 
study, know that in the majority of cases the infirmity 
is the last stage of the declension of a race worn out 
by hereditary perpetuation of luxury, vice, or disease 
the effect of vice. Every ruling family in the East, 
save such as slave marriages have reinvigorated, is 
one of these run-down and exhausted breeds. !N^ot 
only unbounded tyranny and extortion, but incredible 
venality and corruption, prevail in the greater number 
of native States. The Rajah of Travancore, as it is 
said, lately requiring some small bungalow to be added 
to a palace, a builder contracted to build it for 10,000r8. 
After a time, he came to apply to be let off, and on the 
Bajah asking him the reason, he said: *'Your high- 
ness, of the 10,000rs., your prime minister will get 
5000rs., his secretary lOOOrs., the baboos in his office 
another 2000rs., the ladies of the zenana lOOOrs., and 
the commander of your forces 500r8. ; now, the bunga- 
low itself will cost 500rs., so where am I to make my 
proiit?" Corruption, however, pervades in India all 
native institutions; it is not enough to show that native 
States are subject to it, unless we can prove that it is 
worse there than in our own dominions. 

The question whether British or native rule be the 
least distasteful to the people of India is one upon 
which it is not easy to decide. It is not to be expected 
that our government should be popular with the Raj- 
poot chiefs, or with the great nobles of Oude, but it 



272 OBEATER BRITAIN. 

may fairly be contended that the mass of the people 
live in more comfort, and, in spite of the Orissa case, 
are less likely to starve, in English than in native ter- 
ritory. No nation has at any time ever governed aa 
alien empire more wisely or justly than we the Pun- 
jaub. The men who cry out against our rule are the 
nobles and the schemers, who, under it, are left with- 
out a hope. Our leveling rule does not even, like other 
democracies, raise up a military chieftainship. Our 
native officers of the highest rank are paid and treated 
much as are European sergeants, though in native 
States they would of course be generals and princes. 

Want of promotion for sepoys and educated native 
civilians, and the degrading treatment of the high-caste 
people by the English, were causes, among others, of 
the mutiny. The treatment of the natives cannot 
easily be reformed ; if we punish or discourage such 
behavior in our officers, we cannot easily reach the 
European planters and the railway officials, while pun- 
ishment itself would only make men treat the natives 
with violence instead of mere disdain, when out of 
sight of their superiors. There is, however, reason to 
believe that in m;any districts the people are not only 
well off under our government, but that they know it. 
During the native rule in Oude, the population was 
diminished by a continual outpour of fugitives. The 
British district of Mirzapore Chowhare, on the Oude 
frontiers, had a rural population of over 1000 to each 
square mile — a density entirely owing to the emi- 
gration of the natives from their villages in Oude. 
Again, British Burmah is draining of her people 
Upper Burmah, which remains under the old rulers; 
and throughout India the eye can distinguish British 
territories from the native States by the look of pros- 
perity which is borne by all our villages. 



NATIVE STATES. 273 

The native merchants and townsfolk generally are 
our friends. It is unfortunately the fact, however, that 
the cultivators of the soil, who form three-fourths of 
the population of India, believe themselves worse off 
under us than in the native States. They say that 
they care not who rules so long as their holdings are 
secured to them at a fixed rent, whereas under our 
system the zemindars pay us a fixed rent, but in many 
districts exact what they please from the competing 
peasants— a practice which, under the native system, 
was prevented by custom. In all our future land-set- 
tlements, it is to be hoped that the agreement will 
be made, not with middlemen, but directly with the 

people. 

It is not difficult to lay down certain rules for our 
future behavior toward the native States. We already 
exercise over the whole of them a control sufficient to 
secure ourselves against attack in time of peace, but 
not sufficient to relieve us from all fear of hostile action 
in time of internal revolt or external war. It might be 
well that we should issue a proclamation declaring 
that, for the future, we should invariably recognize 
the practice of adoption of children by the native 
rulers, as we have done in the case of the Mysore sue- 
cession; but that, on the other hand, we should re- 
quire the gradual disbandment of all troops not needed 
for the preservation of internal peace. We might well 
commence our action in this matter by calling upon 
the native rulers to bind themselves by treaty no 
longer to keep on foot artillery. In the event of an 
invasion of Ilindostan, a large portion of our European 
force would be needed to overawe the native princes 
and prevent their marching upon our rear. It is im- 
possible to believe that the native States would ever 
be of assistance to us except in cases where we could 



274 GREATER BRITAIN. 

do without their help. During the mutiny, the I^e- 
paulese dehwed their promised march to join us until 
they were certain that we should beat the mutineers, 
and this although theKepaulese are among our surest 
friends. After the nmtiny, it came to light that Luek- 
iiow and Delhi — then native capitals — had been centers 
of intrigue, although we had " Residents" at each, and 
it is probable that Hyderabad and Cashmere City are 
little less dangerous to us now than was Delhi in 1857. 
There is one native State, that of Cashmere and 
Jummoo, which stands upon a very diftereut footing 
from the rest. Created by us as late as 1846, — when we 
sold this best of all the provinces conquered by us from 
the Maha rajahs of Lahore to a Sikh traitor, Gholab 
Singh, an ex-farmer of taxes, for three-quarters of a 
million sterling, which he embezzled from the treasury 
of Lahore, — the State of Cashmere has been steadily 
misgoverned for twenty years. Although our tribu- 
tary, the Maharajah of Cashmere forbids English trav- 
elers to enter his dominions without leave (which is 
granted only to a lixed number of persons every year), 
to employ more than a stated number of servants, to 
travel except by certain passes for fear of their meet- 
ing his wives, to buy provisions except of certain per- 
sons, or to remain in the countrv after the 1st Novem- 
ber under any circumstances whatever. He imprisons 
all native Christians, prohibits the exportation of grain 
whenever there is a scarcity in our territory, and takes 
every opportunity that falls in his way of insulting our 
crovernment and its officials. Our Central Asian trade 
has been ail-but entirely destroyed by the duties levied 
by his officers, and Russia is the Maharajah's chosen 
friend. The unhappy people of the Cashmere valley, 
sold by us, without their consent or knowledge, to a 
family which has never ceased to oppress them, petition 



NATIVE STATES. 275 

UB continually for relief, and, by flocking into our Pun- 
jaub territory, give practical testimony to the wrongs 
they suffer. 

In this case of Cashmere, there is ample ground for 
immediate repurchase or annexation, if annexation it 
can be called to remove or buy out a feudatory family 
which was unjustly raised to powder by us twenty-two 
years ago, and which has broken every article of the 
agreement under which it was placed upon the tribu- 
tary throne. The only reason which has ever been 
shown against the resumption by us of the government 
of the Catthmere valley is the strange argument that, 
by placing it in the hands of a feudatory, we save the 
expense of defending the frontier against the danger- 
ous hill-tribes; although the revenues of the province, 
even were taxation much reduced, would amply suffice 
to meet the cost of continual war, and although our 
experience in Central India has shown that many hill- 
tribes which will not submit to Hindoo rajahs become 
peaceable at once upon our annexation of their coun- 
try. Were Cashmere independent and in the hands of 
its old rulers, there would be ample ground for its an- 
nexation in the prohibition of trade, the hinderance to 
the civilization of Central Asia, the gross oppression of 
the people, the existence of slavery, and the impris- 
onment of Christians ; as it is, the non-annexation of 
the country almost amounts to a crime against man- 
kind. 

Although the necessity of consolidation of our em- 
pire and the progressive character of our rule are 
reasons for annexing the whole of the native States, 
there are other and stronger arguments in favor of 
leaving them as they are ; our policy toward the ITizam 
must be regulated by the consideration that he is now 
the head of the Moslem power in ]ndia, and that hl3 



276 GEE ATE R BRITAIN. 

influence over the Indian Mohammedans may be made 
useful to us in our dealings with that dangerous por- 
tion of our people. Our military arrangements with 
the Nizam are, moreover, on the best of footings. 
Soindia is our friend, and no bad ruler, but some inter- 
ference may be needed with the Guicodar of Baroda 
and with Ilolkar. Our policy toward Mysore is now 
declared, and consists in respecting the native rule 
if the young prince proves himself capable of good 
government; and we might impose simiUir conditions 
upon the remaining princes, and also suppress forced 
labor in their States as we have ail-but suppressed 
Buttee. 

In dealing with the native princes, it is advisable 
that we should remember that we are no interlopers of 
to-day coming into disturb families that have been for 
ages the rulers of the land. Many of the greatest of 
the native families were set up by ourselves; and of 
the remainder, few, if any, have been in possession of 
their countries so long as have the English of Madras 
or Bombay. 

The Guicodars of Baroda and the family of Holkar 
are descended from cowherds, and that of Scindia from 
a peasant, and none of them date back much more than 
a hundred years. The family of the Nabobs of Arcot, 
founded by an adventurer, is not more ancient, neither 
is that of ISTizam : the great Hyder Ali was the son of 
a police-constable, and was unable to read or write. 
While we should religiously adhere to the treaties 
that we have made, we are bound, in the interests of 
humanity, to intervene in all cases where it is certain 
that the mass of the people would prefer our rule, and 
where they aye suffering under slavery or gross op- 
pression, 

IlolJviir has permitted ua to nijvke a r^iilway across his 



NATIVE STATES. 277 

territory, but he levies such enormous duties upon 
goods in transit as to cramp the development of trade 
in a considerable portion of our dominions. JS^ow, the 
fact that a happy combination of circumstances enabled 
the cowherd, his ancestor, to seize upon a certain piece 
of territory a hundred years ago can have given his 
descendants no prescriptive right to impede the civili- 
zation of India; all that we must aim at is to so im- 
prove our governmental system as to make the natives 
themselves see that our rule means the moral advance- 
ment of their country. 

The best argument that can be made use of against 
our rule is that its strensrth and minuteness enfeeble 
the native character. "When we annex a State, we put 
an end to promotion alike in war and learning; and 
under our rule, unless it change its character, enlight- 
enment must decline in India, however much material 
prosperity may increase. 

Under our present system of exclusion of natives 
from the Indian Civil Service, the more boys we 
educate, the more vicious and discontented men we 
have beneath our rule. Were we to throw it open to 
them, under a plan of competition which would admit 
to the service even a small number of natives, we 
should at least obtain a valuable body of friends in 
those admitted, and should make the excluded feel 
that their exclusion was in some measure their own 
fault. As it is, we not only exclude natives from 
our own service, but even to some extent from that 
of the native States, whose levies are often drilled by 
English officers. The Guicodar of Baroda's service is 
popular with Englishmen, as it has become a custom 
that when he has a review he presents each of his 
officers with a year's full pay. 

Our plan of shutting out the natives from all share 
VOL. II. 24 



278 GREATER BRITAIN. 

in the government not only makes our rule unpopu- 
lar, but gives rise to the strongest of all the argu- 
ments in favor of the retention of the existing native 
States, which is, that they ofter a career to shrewd 
and learned natives, \w\\o otherwise would spend their 
leisure in devising plots against us. One of the ablest 
men in India, Madhava Rao, now premier of Travan- 
core, was born in our territory, and was senior scholar 
of his vear in the Madras Colleo^e. That such men as 
Madhava Rao and Salar Jung should be incapable of 
finding suitable emploj^ment in our service is one of 
the standing reproaches of our rule. 

Could we but throw open our service to the natives, 
our government might, with advantage to civiliza- 
tion, be extended over the whole of the native States; 
for, wdiether we are ever to leave India or whether we 
are to remain there till the end of time, there can be 
no doubt but that the course best adapted to raise the 
moral condition of the natives is to mould Hindostan 
into a homogeneous empire sufficiently strong to stand 
by itself against all attacks from without, and inter- 
nally governed by natives, under a gradually weakened 
control from at home. If, after careful trial, we find 
that we cannot educate the people to become active 
supporters of our power, then it will be time to make 
use of the native princes and grandees ; but it is to be 
hoped that the people, as they become well taught, 
will also become the mainstay of our democratic 
rule. 

The present attitude of the mass of the people is 
one of indifference and neutralit}^, which in itself lends 
a kind of passive strength to our rule. During the 
mutiny of 1857, the people neither aided nor opposed 
us; and even had the whole of the land-owners been 
against us, as were those of Oude, it is doubtful 



NATIVE STATES. 279 

whether they could have raised their villagers and 
peasants. Were our policemen relatively equal to 
their officers and to the magistrates, we should never 
hear of native disattection, but we cannot count upon 
the attachment of the people so long as it is possible 
for our constables to procure confessions by the bribery 
of villagers or the application of pots full of wasps to 
their stomachs. 

In the matter of the annexation of those native 
States which still cumber the earth, we are not alto- 
gether free agents. We swallow up States like Bhawul- 
pore just as Russia consumes Bokhara. Everywhere 
indeed, in Asia, strong countries must inevitably swal- 
low up their weaker neighbors. Failure of heirs, 
broken treaties, irregular frontiers — all these are rea- 
sons or assumed reasons for advance ; but the end is 
certain, and is exemplitied in the march of England 
from Calcutta to Peshawur and of Russia from the 
Aral to Turkestan. Our experience in the case of the 
Punjaub shows that even honest discouragement of 
:arther advances on the part of the rulers of the stronger 
power will not always suffice to prevent annexation. 



280 OBEATEE BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER XV^. 

SCINDE. 

Near Mithun Kote, we steamed suddenly into the 
main stream of the Indus, the bed of which is here 
a mile and a quarter wide. Although the river at the 
time of my visit was rising fast, it was far from being 
at its greatest height. In January, it brings down but 
forty thousand cubic feet of water every second, but in 
August it pours down four hundred and fifty thousand. 
The river-bed is rarely covered with running water, 
but the stream cuts a channel for itself upon one shore, 
and flows in a current of eight or nine miles an hour, 
while the remainder of the bed is filled with half-liquid 
sand. 

The navigation of the Indus is monotonous enough. 
"Were it not for the climate, the view would resemble 
that on the Maas, near Rotterdam, though with alli- 
gators lining the banks instead of logs from the Upper 
Meuse; hut climate affects color, and every country 
has tints of its own. California is golden, New Zea- 
land a black-green, Australia yellow, the Indus valley 
is of a blazing red. Although every evening the 
Beloochee Mountains came in sight as the sun sank 
down behind them, and revealed their shapes in 
shadow, all through the day the landscape was one of 
endless flats. The river is a dirty flood, now swift, 
now sluggish, running through a country in which 
sand deserts alternate only with fields of stone. Yil» 



SCINDE. 281 

lages upon the banks there are none, and from town 
to town is a day's journey at the least. The only Ufe 
in the view is given by an occasional sail of gigantic 
size and curious shape, belonging to some native craft 
or other on her voyage from the Punjaub to Kurrachee. 
On oar journey down the Indus, we passed hundreds 
of ships, but met not one. They are built of timber, 
which is plentiful in the Himalayas, upon the head- 
waters of the river, and carry down to the sea the prod- 
uce of the Punjaub. The stream is so strong, that 
the ships are broken up in Scinde, and the crews walk 
back 1000 miles along the bank. In building his ships 
upon the Hydaspes, and sailing them down the Indus 
to its mouth, Alexander did but follow the custom of 
the country. The natives, however, break up their 
ships at Kotree, whereas the Macedonian intrusted his 
to ISTearchus for the voyage to the Gulf of Persia and 
a survey of the coast. 

Geographically, the Indus valley is but a portion of 
the Great Sahara. Those who know the desert well, 
say that from Cape Blanco to Khartoom, from Khar- 
toom to Muscat, from Muscat to Moultan, the desert 
is but one ; the same in the absence of life, the same in 
such life as it does possess. The Valley of the Nile is 
but an oasis, the Gulfs of Persia and of Aden are but 
trifling breaks in its vast width. Rainless, swept by 
dry hot winds laden with prickly sand, traversed every- 
where by low ranges of red and sunburnt rocks, strewn 
with jagged stones, and dotted here and there with a 
patch of dates gathered about some ancient well, such 
is the Sahara for a length of near six thousand miles. 
On the Indus banks, the sand is as salt as it is at Suez, 
and there are as many petriiied trees between Sukkur 
and Kurrachee as there are in the neighborhood of 
Cairo. 

24* 



282 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Our days on board were all passed upon one plan. 
Each morning we rose at dawn, which came about 
iialf-past four, and, watching the starting of the sliip 
from the bank whore she had been moored all night, 
we got a cool walk in our 8leeping-ck)thes before we 
bathed and dressed. The heat then sultbcated us quietly 
till four, when we would reassert the majesty of man by 
bathing, and attempting to walk or talk till dinner, 
which was at live. At dark we anchored, and after 
watching the water-turtles at their play, or hunting for 
the monstrous water-lizards known as *' gos," — appar- 
entl}^ the ichneumons called in Egypt " gots," — or 
sometimes lishing for great mud-±ish with wide mouths 
and powerful teeth, we would resume our sleeping- 
clothes (in which, but for the dignity of the Briton in 
the eyes of the native crew, we should have dined and 
spent the day). At half-past seven or eight, we lay 
down on deck, and forgot our sorrows in sleep, or en- 
gaged in a frantic struggle with the cockroaches. In 
the latter contiict we — in our dreams at least — were not 
victorious, and once in an awful trance I believed my- 
self carried olf by one leg in the jaws of a gigantic 
cockroach, and pushed with his feelers down into his 
horrid hole. 

Each hour passed on the Indus differs from the 
others only in the greater or less portion of it which 
is devoted to getting off the sand-banks. After steam- 
ing gallantly down a narrow but deep and swift piece 
of the river, we would come to a spot at which the 
flood would lose iUelf in crossing its bed from one 
bank to the other. Backing the engines, but being 
whirled along close to the steep bank by the remaining 
portion of the current, we soon felt a shock, the recoil 
from which upset us, chairs and all, it being noticeable 
that we always fell up stream, and not with our heads 



SCINDE. 28 



Q 



ill tlie direction in which the ship was going. As soon 
as we were fairly stuck, the captain flew at the pilot, 
and kicked liirn round the deck — a process always 
borne with fortitude, although the pilot was changed 
every day. The only pilot never kicked was one who 
came on board near Bhawulpore, and who carried a 
jeweled tulwar, or Afghan scirnetar, but even he was 
threatened. The kicking over, an entry of the time 
of grounding was made by the captain in the pilot's 
book, and the mate was ordered out in a boat to sound, 
while the native soldiers on board the flats we were 
towing began quietly to cook their dinner. The mate 
having found a sort of channel, though sometimes it 
had a ridge across it over which the steamer could not 
pass without touching, he returned for a kedge, which 
he fixed in the sand, and we were soon warped up to 
it by the use of the capstan, the native crew singing 
merrily the while. Every now and then, however, we 
would take the ground in the center of the ship, and 
with deep water all round, and then, instead of getting 
off, we for hours together only pivoted round and round. 
One of the Indus boats, with a line regiment on board, 
was once aground for a month near Mithun Kote, to 
the entire destruction of all the wild boars in the neigh- 
borhood. 

The kicking of the unfortunate pilots was not a 
pleasant sight, but there were sometimes comic inci- 
dents attached to our periodic groundings. Once I 
noticed that the five men who were constantly sound- 
ing with colored poles in different parts of the ship 
and flats, had got into a monotonous chorus of "p4n- 

che e pot" ("five feet") — we drawing only three, so 

that we went ahead confidently at full speed, when 
suddenly we ran aground with a violent shock. On 
the re-sounding of our course by the boat's ciew, we 



2S4 GREATER BRITAIN. 

found that our pole-meu must, for some time past, 
have been guessing the soundings to save the trouble 
of looking. These fellows richly deserved a kicking, 
but the pilots are innocent of any fault but inability 
to keep pace with the rapid changes of the river-course. 

Another curious scene took place one day when we 
were eteamins: down a rea<?h in which the river made 
many sudden twists and turns. We had on board a 
merchant from the Persian Gulf, a devout Moham- 
medan. In the afternoon, he carried his praying-carpet 
on to the bridge between the paddle-boxes, and there, 
turning to the w^est, commenced to pray. The sun 
was on his left, but almost facing him; in an instant, 
round whirled the ship, making her course between 
tAvo sand-bars, and Mecca and the sun into the bargain 
were right behind our worshiper. This was too much 
even for his devotion, so, glancing at the new course, 
he turned his carpet, and, looking in the fresh direc- 
tion, recommenced his prayers. After a minute or 
two, back went the ship, and we began again to steer 
a southerly course. All this time the Persian kept his 
look of complete abstraction, and remained unshaken 
through all his difficulties. This seriousness in face of 
events which would force into shouts of laughter any 
European congregation is a characteristic of a native. 
It is strange that Englishmen are nowhere so easily 
provoked to loud laughter as in a church or college 
chapel, natives at no time so insusceptible of ridicule 
as when engaged upon the services of their religions. 

The shallowness of the Indus, its impracticability for 
steamships during some months of the year, and the 
manv windin2:s of the stream — all these thintrs make 
it improbable that the river will ever be largely avail- 
able for purposes of trade; at the same time, the Indus 
valley must necessarily be the line taken by the com- 



SC INDE. 285 

merce of the Punjaub, and eventually by that of some 
portions of Central Asia, and even of Southern China. 
Whether Kurrachee becomes our great Indian port, or 
whether our railway be made through Beloochistan, a 
safe and speedy road up the Indus valley for troops and 
trade is needed. 

If we take into consideration the size of India, the 
amount of its revenues, and the length of time during 
which we have occupied that portion of its extent 
which we at present hold, it is impossible to avoid the 
conclusion that not even in Australia have railways 
been more completely neglected than they have been 
in India. We have opened but 4000 miles, or one 
mile for every 45,000 people. Nothing has been 
touched as yet but the Grand Trunk and great mili- 
tary and postal routes, and even these are little more 
than half completed. Even the Bombay and Calcutta 
mail line and the Calcutta and Lahore lines are hardly 
finished ; the Peshawur line and the Indus road not 
3-et begun. While at home people believe that the 
Euphrates Valley Railway is under consideration, they 
will find, if they come out to India, that to reach Pe- 
shawur in 34° j^. latitude they must go to Bombay in 
18°, if not to Galle in 6°. Even if they reach Kurra- 
chee, they will find it a month's journey to Peshawur. 
While w^e are trying to tempt the w^ool and shawls of 
Central Asia down to Umritsur and Lahore, the goods 
with which we would buy these things are sent round 
by the Cape of Good Hope and Calcutta. 

It is true that the Indus line will be no easy one to 
make. To bridge the river at Mithun Kote or even 
at Kotree would be difficult enough, and were it to be 
bridged at Sukkur, where there is rock, and a narrow 
pass upon the river, the line from Sukkur to Kurra- 
chee would be exposed to depredation from the fron- 



286 GREATER BRITAIN. 

tier tribes. The difficulties are great, but the need is 
ffi'eater, and the arsrnment of the heavy cost of river- 
side raih'oads should not weigh with lis in the case of 
lines required for the safety of the>countrv. The La- 
hore and Peshawur, the Kotree and Moultan, the Ko- 
tree and Baroda, and the Baroda and Delhi lines, in- 
stead of being set one against the other for comparison, 
should be simultaneously completed as necessary for 
the defense of the empire, and as forming the trunk 
lines for innumerable branches into the cotton- and 
wheat-2:rowin s; districts. 

One of the branches of the Indus line will have 
to be constructed from the Bholan Pass to Sukkur, 
Avhere we lay some days embarking cotton. Sukkur 
lies on the Beloochistan side; Roree fort — known as 
the *'Key of Scinde," the seizure of which by us pro- 
voked the erreat war with the Ameers — on an island 
in mid-stream; and Bukkur City on the eastern or left 
bank; and the river, here narrowed to a width of a 
quarter of a mile, runs with the violence of a mountain 
torrent. 

Sukkur is one of the most ancient of Indian cities, 
and was mentioned as time-worn by the Greek geog- 
raphers, while tradition says that its antiquities 
attracted Alexander; but towns grow old with great 
rapidity in India, and, once ancient in their look, 
never to the eye become in the slightest degree older. 

In Sukkur I first saw the Scindee cap, which may 
be described as a tall hat with the brim atop ; but the 
Scindees were not the only strangely-dressed traders 
in Sukkur and Roree: there were high-capped Per- 
sians, and lean Afghans with long gaunt faces and 
high cheek-bones, and furred merchants from Central 
Asia. It is even said that goods find their way over- 
land from China to Sukkur, through Eastern Persia 



SCINDE. 287 

and Beloochistan, the traders preferring to come round 
four thousand miles than to cross the main chain of 
the Himalayas or pass through the country of the 
Afghans. 

In ancient times there was considerable intercourse 
between China and Hindostan; at the end of the 
seventh century, indeed, the Chinese invaded India 
through Nepaul, and captured live hundred cities. It 
is to be hoped that the next few years may see a rail- 
way built from Rangoon to Southern China, and from 
Calcutta to the Yang-tse-Kiang, a river upon which 
there are ample stores of coal, which would supply the 
manufacturing wants of India. 

After viewing from a lofty tower the flat country 
in the direction of Shikapore, we spent one of our 
Sukkur evenings upon the island of Roree watching 
the natives fishing. Casting themselves into the river 
on the top of skins full of air, or more commonly on 
great earthenware pitchers, they floated at a rapid pace 
down with the whirling stream, pushing before them 
a sunken net which they could close and lift by the 
drawing of a string. About twice a minute they 
would strike a fish, and, lifting their head, would im- 
pale the captive on a stick slung behind their back, 
and at once lower again the net in readiness for fur- 
ther action. 

Sukkur, like seven other places that I had visited 
within a year, has the reputation of being the hottest 
city in the world, and the joke on the boats of the 
Indus flotilla is that Moultan is too hot to bear, and 
Sukkur much hotter; but that Jacobabad, on the 
Beloochee frontier, near Sukkur, is so hot that the 
people come down thence to Sukkur for the hot season, 
and find its coolness as refreshing as ordinary mortals 
do that of Simla. Hot as is Sukkur, it is fairly beaten 



288 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

by a spot at the foot of the Ibex Hills, near Sehwan. 
I was sleeping on the bridge with an officer from Pe- 
shawur, when the crew were preparing to put off from 
the bank for the day's journey. We were awakened 
by the noise ; but, as we sat up and rubbed our eyes, a 
blast of hot wind came down from the burnt-up hills, 
laden with fine sand, and of such a character that 1 got 
a lantern — for it was not fully light — and made my way 
to the deck thermometer. I found it standing at 104°, 
although the hour was 4*15 a.m. At breakfast-time, 
it had fallen to 100°, from which it slowly rose, until 
at 1 P.M. it registered 116° in the shade. The next 
night, it never fell below 100°. This was the highest 
temperature I experienced in India during the hot 
w^eather, and it was, singularly enough, the same as 
the highest which I recorded in Australia. No part 
of the course of the Indus is within the tropics, but it 
is not in the tropics that the days are hottest, although 
the nights are generally unbearable on sea-level near 
the equator. 

At Kootree, near Hydrabad, the capital of Scinde, 
where the tombs of the Ameers are imposing, if far 
from beautiful, we left the Indus for the railway, and, 
after a night's journey, found ourselves upon the sea- 
shore at Kurrachee. 



OVE BLAND ROUTES. 289 



CHAPTER XYL 

OVERLAND ROUTES. 

Of all the towns in India, Kurrachee is the least 
Indian. With its strong southwesterly breeze, its 
open sea and dancing waves, it is to one coming from 
the Indus valley a pleasant place enough; and the 
climate is as good as that of Alexandria, though there 
is at Kurrachee all the dust of Cairo. For a stranger 
detained against his will to find Kurrachee bearable 
there must be something refreshing in its breezes: 
the town stands on a treeless plain, and of sights 
there are none, unless it be the sacred alligators at 
Muggur Peer, where the tame "man-eaters" spring 
at a goat for the visitor's amusement as freely as the 
"Wolfsbrunnen trout jump at the gudgeon. 

There is no reason given why the alligators' pool 
should be reputed holy, but in India places easily 
acquire sacred fame. About PeshaWur there dwell 
many hill-fanatics, whose sole religion appears to con- 
sist in stalking British sentries. So many of them 
have been locked up in the Peshawur jail that it has 
become a holy place, and men are said to steal and 
riot in the streets of the bazaar in order that they may 
be consigned to this sacred temple. 

The nights were noisy in Kurrachee, for the great 
Mohammedan feast of the Mohurrum had commenced, 
and my bimgalow was close to the lines of the police, 
who are mostly Belooch Mohammedans. Every even- 
ing, at dusk, fires were lighted in the police-lines and 
VOL. II. 25 



290 OMEATER BRITAIN. 

the bazaar, and then the toratom-ing gradually in- 
creased from the gentle drone of the daytime until 
a perfect storm of "tom-a-tom, tomtom, tom-a-tom, 
tomtom," burst from all quarters of the town, and 
continued the whole night long, relieved only by 
blasts from conch-shells and shouts of *'Shah Hassan! 
Shah Hoosein! Wah Allah! Wah Alhih!" as the per- 
formers danced round the flames. I heartily wished 
myself in the State of Bhawulpore, where there is a 
license-tax on the beating of drums at feasts. The 
first night of the festival I called up a native servant 
who "spoke English," to make him take me to the 
tires and explain the matter. His only explanation was 
a continual repetition of *'Dat Mohurrum, Mohamme- 
dan Christmas-day." When each night, about dawn, 
the tomtom-ing died away once more, the chokedars 
— or night watchmen — woke up from their sound 
sleep, and began to shout "Ila ha!" into every room 
to show that they were awake. 

The chokedars are well-known characters in every 
Indian station : always either sleepy and useless, or 
else in league with the thieves, they are nevertheless 
a recognized class, and are everywhere employed. At 
Rawul-Pindee and Peshawur, the chokedars are armed 
with guns, and it is said that a newly-arrived English 
officer at the former place was lately returning from a 
dinner-party, when he was challenged by the chokedar 
of the first house he had to pass. Not knowing what 
reply to make, he took to his heels, when the chokedar 
fired at him as he ran. The shot woke all the choke- 
dars of the parade, and the unfortunate officer received 
the fire of every man as he passed alotig to his house 
at the farther end of the lines, which he reached, how- 
ever, in perfect safety. It has been suggested that, for 
the purpose of excluding all natives from the lines at 



OVERLAND ROUTES. 291 

night, there should be a shibboleth or standing parole 
of some word which no native can pronounce. The 
word suggested is ''Shoeburyness." 

Although chokedars were silent and tomtom-ing 
subdued during the daytime, there were plenty of 
other sounds. Lizards chirped from the walls of my 
room, and sparrows twittered from every beam and 
rafter of the roof. When I told a Kurrachee friena 
that my slippers, my brushes, and soldier's writing- 
case had all been thrown by me on to the chief beam 
during an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the enemy, 
he replied that for his part he paraded his drawing- 
room every morning with a double-barreled gun, 
and frequently fired into the rafters, to the horror of 
his wife. 

In a small lateen-rigged yacht lent us by a fellow- 
traveler from Moultan, some of us visited the works 
which have long been in progress for the improvement 
of the harbor of Kurrachee, and which form the sole 
topic of conversation among the residents in the town. 
The works have for object the removal of the bar which 
obstructs the entrance to the harbor, with a view to 
permit the entry of larger ships than can at present 
find an anchorage at Kurrachee. 

The most serious question under discussion is that 
of whether the bar is formed by the Indus silt or 
merely by local causes, as, if the former supposition is 
correct, the ultimate disposition of the ten thousand 
millions of cubic feet of mud which the Indus annu- 
ally brings down is not likely to be aflected by such 
works as those in progress at Kurrachee. When a 
thousand sealed bottles were lately thrown into the 
Indus for it to be seen whether they would reach the 
bar, the result of the "great bottle trick," as Kurra- 
chee people called it, was that only one bottle reached 



292 GREATER BRITAIK 

and not one weathered a point six miles to the soiirh- 
ward of the harbor. The bar is improving every year, 
and has now some twenty feet of water, so that ships 
of 1000 tons can enter except in the monsoon, and the 
general belief of engineers is that the completion of 
the present works will materially increase the depth of 
water. 

The question of this bar is not one of merely local 
interest: a single glance at the map is sufficient to 
show the importance of Kurrachee. Already rising at 
an unprecedented pace, having trebled her shipping 
and quadrupled her trade in ten years, she is destined 
to make still greater strides as soon as the Indus Rail- 
way is completed, and finally — when the Persian Gulf 
route becomes a fact — to be the greatest of the ports 
of India. 

That a railway must one day be completed from 
Constantinople or from some port on the Mediterra- 
nean to Bussorah on the Persian Gulf is a point which 
scarcely admits of doubt. From Kurrachee or Bom- 
bay to London by the Euphrates valley and Constanti- 
nople is ail-but a straight line, while from Bombay to 
London by Aden and Alexandria is a wasteful curve. 
The so-called "Overland Route" is half as long again 
as would be the direct line. The Red Sea and Isthmus 
route has neither the advantage of unbroken sea nor 
of unbroken land transit; the direct route with a 
bridge near Constantinople might be extended into a 
land road from India to Calais or Rotterdam. The 
Red Sea line passes along the shores of Arabia, where 
there is comparatively little local trade ; the Persian 
Gulf route would develop the remarkable wealth of 
Persia, and would carry to Europe a local commerce 
already great. At the entrance of the Persian Gulf, 
near Cape Mussendoom or Ormuz, we should establish 



OVERLAND ROUTES, 293 

a free port on the plan of Singapore. In 1000 a.d., 
tlie spot now known as Ormuz was a barren rock, but 
a few years of permanent occupation of the spot as a 
free port changed the barren islet into one of the 
wealthiest cities in the world. The Ked Sea route 
crosses Egypt, the direct route crosses Turkey; and it 
cannot be too strongly urged that in war time "Egypt" 
means Russia or France, while " Turkey" means Great 
Britain. 

In any scheme of a Constantinople and Gulf rail- 
road, Kurrachee would play a leading part. Not only 
the wheat and the cotton of the Punjaub and of the 
then irrigated Scinde, but the trade of Central Asia 
would flow down the Indus, and it is hardly too much 
to believe that the silks of China, the teas of Northern 
India, and the shawls of Cashmere will all of them one 
day lind in Kurrachee their chief port. The earliest 
known overland route was that by the Persian Gulf. 
Chinese ships traded to Ormuz in the fifth and seventh 
centuries, bringing silk and iron, and it may be doubted 
whether any of the Russian routes will be able to com- 
pete with the more ancient Euphrates valley line of 
trade. Shorter, passing through countries well known 
and comparatively civilized, admitting at once of the 
use of land and water transport side by side, it is far 
superior in commercial and political advantages to any 
of the Russian desert roads. A route through Upper 
Persia has been proposed, but merchants of experience 
will tell you that greater facilities for trade are ex- 
tended to Europeans in even the "closed'^ ports of 
China than upon the coasts of Persia, and the pros- 
pect of the freedom of trade upon a Persian railroad 
would be but a bad one, it may be feared. 

The return of trade to the Gulf route will revive the 
glory of many fallen cities of the Middle Ages. Ormuz 

25* 



294 GREATER BRITAIN. 

and x\fitioch, Cyprus and Rhodes, have a second his- 
tory before them ; Crete, Briudisi, and Venice will 
each obtain a renewal of their ancient fame. Alexan- 
der of Macedon was the first man who took a scientific 
view of the importance of the Gulf route, but we have 
hitherto drawn but little profit from the lesson con- 
tained in his commission to Nearchus to survey the 
coast from the Indus to the Euphrates. The advan- 
tage to be gained from the completion of the railway 
from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf w^ill not fall 
only to the share of India and Great Britain. Holland 
and Belgium are, in proportion to their wealth, at the 
least as greatly interested in the Euphrates route as 
are we ourselves, and should join us in its construction. 
The Pntch trade with Java would be largely benefited, 
and Dutch ports would become the shipping-places for 
Eastern merchandise on its way to England and north- 
east America, while, to the cheap manufactures of 
Liege, India, China, and Central Asia would aftbrd the 
best of markets. If the line were a double one, to the 
w^est and north of Aleppo, one branch running to Con- 
stantinople and the other to the Mediterranean at Scan- 
deroon, the whole of Europe would benefit by the Per- 
sian trade, and, in gaining the Persian trade, w^ould 
gain also the power of protecting Persia against Rus- 
sia, and of thus preventing the dominance of a crush- 
ing despotism throughout the Eastern world. In a 
thousand ways, however, the advantages of the line 
to all Europe are so plainly manifest, that the only 
question worth discussing is the nature of the difficul- 
ties that hinder its completion. 

The difficulties in the way of the Gulf route are po- 
litical and financial, and both have been exaggerated 
without limit. The project for a railway from Con- 
stantinople to the Persian Gulf has been compared to 



OVERLAND ROUTES. 295 

that for the construction of a railroad from the Mis- 
souri to the Pacific. In 1858, the American line was 
looked on as a mere speculator's dream, while the Eu- 
phrates Railway was to be commenced at once; ten 
years have passed, and the Pacific Railway is a fact, 
while the Indian line has been forgotten. 

It is not that the making of the Euphrates line is a 
more difficult matter than that of crossing the Plains 
and Rocky Mountains. The distance from St. Louis 
to San Francisco is 1600 miles, that from Constanti- 
nople to Bussorah is but 1100 miles; or from Scande- 
roon to Bussorah only 700 miles. From London to 
the Persian Gulf is not so far as from Kew York to 
San Francisco. The American line had to cross two 
great snowy chains and a waterless tract of consider- 
able width : the Indian route crosses no passes so lofty 
as those of the Rocky Mountains or so difiicult as those 
of the Sierra Nevada, and is well watered in its whole 
length. On the American line there is little coal, if 
any, while the Euphrates route would be plentifully 
supplied with coal from the neighborhood of Bagdad. 
When the American line was commenced, the pro- 
posed track lay across unknown wilds: the Constanti- 
nople and Persian Gulf route passes through venerable 
towns, the most ancient of all the cities of the world, 
and the route itself is the oldest known highway of 
trade. The chief of all the advantages possessed by 
the Indian line which is wanting in America is the 
presence of ample labor on all parts of the road. 
Steamers are already running from Bombay and Kur- 
rachee to the Persian Gulf; others on the Tigris, and 
a portion of the Euphrates; there is a much-used road 
from Bagdad to Aleppo ; and a Turkish military road 
from Aleppo to Constantinople, to which city a direct 
railroad will soon be opened ; and a telegraph-line be- 



20G OREATEB BRITAIN. 

longing to an English company already crosses Asian 
Turkey from end to end. iNTotwiilistanding the facili- 
ties, the Euphrates Railway is still a project, while the 
Atlantic and Pacific line will he opened in 1870. 

"Were the financial difiiculties those which the sup- 
porters of the line have in reality to meet, it might be 
urged that there will be a great local traffic between 
Bussorah, Bagdad, and Aleppo, and from all these 
cities to the sea, and that the government mail sub- 
sidies will be hnge, and the Indian trade, even in the 
worst of years, considerable. Were the indifi:erence 
of Belgium, Germany, and Holland such that they 
should refuse to contribute toward the cost of the line, 
its importance would amply warrant a moderate addi- 
tion to the debt of India. 

The real difficulties that have to be encountered are 
political rather than financial; the covert opposition of 
France and Egypt is not less powerful for evil than is 
the open hostility of Russia. Happily for India, how- 
ever, the territories of our ally Turkey extend to the 
Persian Gulf, for it must be remembered that for rail- 
way purposes Turkish rule, if we so please, is equiva- 
lent to English rule. As it happens, no active measures 
are needed to advance our line; but, were it otherwise, 
such intervention as might be necessary to secure the 
safety of the great highw^ay for Eastern trade with 
Europe would be defensible were it exerted toward a 
purely independent government. 

The pressure to be put upon the Ottoman Porte 
must be direct and governmental. For a private com- 
pany to conduct a great enterprise to a successful con- 
clusion in Eastern countries is always difficult; but 
when the matter is political in its nature, or, if com- 
mercial, at least hindered on political grounds, a 
private company is powerless. It is, moreover, the 



OVERLAND ROUTES. 297 

practice of Eastern governments to grant concessions 
of important works which they cannot openly oppose, 
but which in truth they wish to hinder, to companies 
Bo formed as to be incapable of proceeding with the 
undertaking. When others apply, the government 
answers them that nothing further can be done: "the 
concession is already granted." 

Whatever steps are taken, a bold front is needed. 
It mii^ht even be advisable that we should declare 
that the Euphrates Valley Railway through the Turk- 
ish territory from Constantinople and Scanderoon 
through Aleppo to Bagdad and Bussorah, and suffi- 
cient military posts to^ insure its security in time of 
war, are necessary to our tenure of India, and that 
we should call upon Turkey to grant us permission to 
commence our work, on pain of the withdrawal of our 

protection. 

Our general principle of non-interference is always 
liable to be set aside on proof of the existence of a 
higher necessity for intervention than for adherence to 
our golden rule, and it may be contended that suffi- 
cient proof has been shown in the present instance. 
Whether public action is to be taken, or the matter to 
be left to private enterprise, it is hard to resist the 
conclusion that the Direct Route to India is one of the 
most pressing of the questions of the day. 

When, in company with my fellow-passengers from 
Moultan, I left Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on 
board the then Commissioner of Scinde, who was on 
his way to take his seat as a member of Council at 
Bombay. A number of the leading men of Scinde 
came on board to bid farewell to him before he 
sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but 
for our annexation of the country, would be the 
reigning Ameers at this moment. 



2US GBEATER BBITAIN, 

Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur, 
surpassed in glittering pomp the caps and haldrics of 
tliese Scindee chieftains; neither could anything be 
strano'er than their dress. One had on a silk coat of 
pale green shot with yellow, satin trowsers, and velvet 
slippers with curled peaks; another wore a jacket of 
dark amber with flowers in white lace. A third was 
clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with amber; and 
the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk 
and gold, and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the 
strange-shaped Scindian hat; all had jeweled dirks, 
with curiously-wrought scabbards to hold their swords, 
and gorgeously embroidered baldrics to support them. 
The sight, however, of no number of sapphires, tur- 
quoises, and gold clothes could have reconciled me to 
a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I rejoiced when 
our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship's 
side to the sound of the Lascars' anchor-tripping 
chorus, and left the deck to the " Proconsul " and 
ourselves. 



CHAPTER XVII. 



BOMBAY. 



Crossing the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and 
Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two 
days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point 
and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting 
up the distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by 
the time we had dropped anchor it was dark, so I slept 
on board. 



BOMBAY. 299 

I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked 
mountains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded 
summits of the islands, while a light land breeze rip- 
pled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive 
with the bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats. 
The manyAvoods coming down in rich green masses 
into the sea itself lent a singular softness to the view, 
and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all 
nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the 
Swedish to the Greek. 

The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though 
the even mass of green is broken here and there by 
the crimson cones of the *'gold mohur" trees, resem- 
bles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical 
than Indian, but there is nothing tropical and little 
that is Eastern in the bustle of the bay. The lines of 
huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by the still 
more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you 
with a sense of wealth and worldliness from which 
you gladly seek relief by turning toward the misty 
beauty of the mountain islands and the Western 
Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely; 
as it is, the distances are over-great. 

!N^otwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes 
of defense is singularly weak. The absence of bat- 
teries from the entrance to so great a trading port 
strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and 'New 
York, and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle 
of the cannon-balls of the African admirals of the 
Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay merchants 
to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a 
reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of 
view, Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the 
approach to which can easily be cut ofl^", and its people 
starved. One advantage, however, of the erection of 



300 GEE ATE B BRITAIN. 

batteries at the harbor's mouth would be, that the 
present fort might be pulled down, unless it were 
thought advisable to retain it for the protection of the 
Europeans against riots, and that in any case the 
broad space of cleared ground which now cuts the 
town in half might be partly built on. 

The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is 
the result of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to 
the sudden decline of which, in 1865 and 1866, has 
also been attributed the ruin that fell upon the city 
in the last-named year. The panic, from which Bom- 
bay has now so far recovered that it can no longer be 
said that she has "not one merchant solvent," was 
chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which 
the shares in a land-reclamation company which never 
commenced its operations once touched a thousand 
per cent., but was intensified by the passage of the 
English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round 
the world. 

Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely 
king than in Bombay. Cotton has collected the hun- 
dred steamers and the thousands of native boats that 
are anchored between the Apollo Bunder and Maza- 
gon; cotton has built the great ofiices and stores of 
seven and eight stories high; cotton has furnished the 
villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New Yorkers* 
cottages on Staten Island. 

The export of cotton from India rose from five mil- 
lions' worth in 1859 to thirty-eight millions' worth in 
1864, and the total exports of Bombay increased in 
the same proportion, while the population of the city 
rose from 400,000 to 1,000,000. We are accustomed 
to look at the Ea'^t fi^ ^ta^clfttg 3t|ll, but Chicago itself 
never toofe: ^ grander leap than did Bombay between 
I860 a?i4 IB64. The rebellion in 4-nierica gayp the 



BOMBAY. 301 

impetus, "but was not the sole caase of this prosperity; 
and the Indian cotton-trade, though checked by the 
peace, is not destroyed. Cotton and jute are not the 
only Indian raw products the export of which has in- 
creased suddenly of late. The export of wool increased 
twentyfold; of tobacco, threefold, of coffee, sevenfold 
in the last six years ; and the export of Indian tea in- 
creased in five years from nothing to three or four 
hundred thousand pounds. The old Indian exports, 
those which we associate with the term "Eastern 
trade," are standing still, while the raw produce trade 
is thus increasing: — spices, elephants' teeth, pearls, 
jewels, bandannas, shellac, dates, and gum are all de- 
creasing, although the total exports of the country 
have trebled in five years. 

India needs but railroads to enable her to compete 
successfully with America in the growth of cotton, but 
the development of the one raw product will open out 
her hitherto unknown resources. 

While staying at one of the great merchant-houses 
in the Fort, I was able to see that the commerce of 
Bombay has not grown up of itself. With some ex- 
perience among hard workers in the English towns, I 
was, nevertheless, astonished at the work got through 
by senior clerks and junior partners at Bombay. 
Although at first led away by the idea that men who 
wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking- 
chairs upon the balcony for an hour after breakfast, 
cannot be said to get through much work, I soon 
found that men in merchants' houses at Bombay work 
harder than they would be likely to do at home. 
Their day begins at 6 a.m., and, as a rule, they work 
from then till dinner at 8 or 9 p.m., taking an hour 
for breakfast, and two for tifiin. My stay at Bombay 
was during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelve 
VOL. II. 26 



302 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Lours' work in the day, with the thermometer never 
under 90° all the night, is an exhausting life. English- 
men could not long survive the work, but the Bombay 
merchants are all Scotch. In British settlements, from 
Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every 
Englishman that you meet who has worked -himself up 
to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, 
you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that 
Scotland has not become the popular name for the 
United Kingdom. 

Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is 
not always May or June, and from ISTovember to March 
the climate is ail-but perfect. Even in the hottest 
weather, the Byculla Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar 
is close at hand, for short excursions, whenever the 
time is found; while the Bombav mamjo is a fruit 
which may bear comparison with the peaches of Salt 
Lake City, or the melons of San Francisco. The 
Bombay merchants have not time, indeed, to enjoy the 
beauties of their city, any more than Londoners have 
to visit Westminster Abbey or explore the Tower; 
and as for "tropical indolence," or "Anglo-Indian 
luxury," the bull-dogs are the only members of the 
English community in India who can discover any- 
thing but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each 
dog has his servant to attend to all his wants, and, 
knowing this, the cunning brute alw<iys makes the 
boy carry him up the long flights of stairs that lead 
to the private rooms over the merchants' houses in 
the Fort. 

Bombay bazaar is the gayest of gay scenes. Be- 
sides the ordinary crowd oi any "native town," there 
are solemn Jains, copper-colored Jews, white-coated 
Portuguese, Persians, Arabs, Catholic priests, bespan- 
gled nautch girls, and grinning Seedees. The Parseea 



BOMBAY. 303 

are strongest of all the merchant peoples of Bombay 
ill numbers, m intelligence, and in wealth. Among 
the shopkeepers of their race, there is an over-promi- 
nence of trade shrewdness in the expression of the 
face, and in the shape even of the head. The Louvre 
bust of liichelieu, in which we have the idea of a 
wheedler, is a common type in the Parsee shops of the 
Bombay bazaar. The Parsee people, however, what- 
ever their looks, are not onl}^ in complete possession 
of Bombaj', but are the dark-skinned race to which we 
shall have to intrust the largest share in the regenera- 
tion of the East. Trading as they do in every city be- 
tween Galle and Astrakan, but everywhere attached 
to the English rule, they bear to us the relative posi- 
tion that the Greeks occupy toward Russia. 

Both in religion and in education, the Parsees are, 
as a community, far in advance of the Indian Moham- 
medans, and of the Hindoos. Their creed has become 
a pure deism, in which God's works are worshiped as 
the manifestations or visible representatives of God 
on earth, fire, the sun^ and the sea taking the first 
places; although in the climate of Bombay prayers to 
the sun must be made up of more supplications than 
thanksgivings. The Parsee men are soundly taught, 
and there is not a pauper in the whole tribe. In the 
education and elevation of women, no Eastern race 
has as yet done much, but the Parsees have done the 
most, and have paved the way for further progress. 

In the matter of the seclusion of women, the Parsee 
movement has had some eftect even upon others than 
Parsees, and the Hindoos of Bombay City stand far 
before even those of Calcutta in the earnestness and 
success of their endeavors to promote the moral eleva- 
tion of women, i^othing can be done toward the re- 
generation of India so long as the women of all classes 



304 OREATEH BRITAIN. 

remain in their present deg^radation ; and although 
many native gentlemen in Bombay ah*eady recognize 
the fact, and act upon it, progress is slow, since there 
is no basis npon which to begin. The Hindoos will 
not send their wives to schools where there are Euro- 
pean lady teachers, for foar of proselytism taking 
place; and native women teachers are not yet to be 
found; hence all teaching must needs be left to men. 
Nothing, moreover, can be done with female children 
in Western India, where girls are married at from live 
to twelve years old. 

I had not been two days in Bombay when a pla- 
card caught my eye, announcing a performance at the 
theater of " Romeo and Juliet, in the Maratta tongue;" 
but the play had no Friar Lawrence, no apothecary, 
and no nurse ; it was nothing but a simple Maratta 
love-tale, followed by some religious tableaux. In the 
iirst piece an Englishman was introduced, and repre- 
sented as kicking every native that crossed his path 
with the exclamation of *' Damned fool :" at each repe- 
tition of which the whole house laughed. It is to be 
feared that this portion of the play was '' founded upon 
fact." On my way home through the native town at 
night, I came on a marriage procession better than any 
that I had seen. A band of titers were screaming the 
most piercing of notes in front of an illuminated house, 
at which the horsemen and carriages were just arriving, 
both men and women clothed in jeweled robes, and 
silks of a hundred colors, that Hashed and glittered in 
the blaze of the red torches. The procession, like the 
ofreater number of the most a^orc^eous ceremonials of 
Bombay, was conducted by Parsees to celebrate the 
marriage of one of their own people; but it is a curious 
fact that night marriages were forced upon the Parsees 
by the Hindoos, and one of the conditions upon which 



THE MOHURRUM. 305 

the Parsees were received into India was, that their 
marriage processions should take place at night. 

The Caves of Elephanta have been many times 
described. The grandest sight of India, after the Tuj, 
is the three-faced bust of the Hindoo Trinity, or God 
in his threefold character of Creator, Preserver, and 
Destroyer. No Grecian sculpture that I have seen so 
well conveys the idea of Godhead. The Greeks could 
idealize man, the Italians can paint the saint, but the 
builders of Elephanta had the power of executing the 
highest ideal of a pagan god. The repose which dis- 
tinguishes the heads of the Creator and Preserver is 
not the meditation of the saint, but the calm of un- 
bounded power; and the Destroyer's head portends not 
destruction, so much as annihilation, to the world. 
The central head is, in its mysterious solemnity, that 
which the Sphinx should be, and is not, but one at- 
tribute alone is common to the expression of all three 
faces, — the presence of the Inscrutable. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE MOHURRUM. 

Although Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital, 
and a thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout 
India for the splendor with which its people celebrate 
the Mohammedan Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in 
such a way as to reach the town upon the day of the 
*' taboot procession." 

The as:;ent from the Konkan, or flat country of 

26* 



306 ORE ATE R BRITAIN. 

Bombay, by the Western Ghauts to the table-land of 
the Deccan,- known as the Bhore Ghaut incline, in 
which the railway rises from the plain 2000 feet into 
the Deccan, by a series of steps sixteen miles in length, 
is far more striking as an engineering work than the 
passage of the Alleghanies on the Baltimore and Ohio 
track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada rail- 
way works. The views from the carriage windows are 
singularly like those in the Kaduganava Pass between 
Columbo and Kandy ; in fact, the Western Ghauts are 
of the same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the 
hills being almost invariably either flat-topped or else 
rent by volcanic action into great pinnacles and needle- 
peaks. 

The rainy season had not commenced, and the vege- 
tation that gives the Ghauts their charm was wanting, 
although the " mango showers" were beginning, and 
spiders and other insects, unseen during the hot wea 
ther, were creeping into the houses to seek shelter from 
the rains. One of the early travelers to the Deccan 
told the good folks at home that after the rains the 
spiders' webs were so thickly laced across the jungle 
that the natives of the country were in the habit of 
hiring elephants to walk before them and force a pas- 
sage ! At the time of my visit, neither webs nor jun- 
gle were to be seen, and the spiders were very harm- 
less-looking fellows- One effect of the approaching 
monsoon was visible from the summit of the Ghaut, for 
the bases of the mountains were hid by the low clouds 
that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are held 
to be unsafe during the monsoon, but they are not so 
bad as the Kotree and Kurrachee line, which runs only 
" weather permitting," and is rendered useless by two 
hours' rain — a fall which, luckily for the shareholders, 
occurs only about once in every seven years. On the 



THE MOHVRRUM. 307 

Bliore Ghaut, on the contrary, 220 inches in four 
months is not unusual, and "the rains'^ here take the 
place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry away 
bridges, lines, and trains themselves; but in the dry 
season there is a want of the visible presence of diffi- 
culties overcome, which detracts from the interest of 
the line. 

At daybreak at Poonah, the tomtom-ing, which had 
lasted without intermission through the ten days' fast, 
came to a sudden end, and the police and European 
magistrates began to marshal the procession of the 
taboots, or shrines, in the bazaar. 

A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted 
on the walls, announcing the order of the procession 
and the rules to be enforced. The orders were that 
the procession to the river was to commence at 7 a.m. 
and to end at 11 a.m., and that tomtom-ing, except 
during those hours, would not be allowed. The ta- 
boots of the light cavalry, of three regiments of native 
infantry, and of the followers of three English regi- 
ments of the line, and of the Sappers and Miners, were, 
however, to start at six o'clock; the order of preced- 
ence among the cantonment or regimental taboots was 
carefully laid down, and the carrying of arms for- 
bidden. 

When I reached the bazaar, I found the native 
police, were working in vain in trying to force into line 
a vast throng of bannermen, drummers, and saints, 
who surrounded the various taboots or models of the 
house of Ali and Fatima where their sons Hassan and 
Hoosein were born. Some of the shrines were of the 
size and make of the doUs'-houses of our Endish 
children, others in their height and gorgeousness re- 
sembled the most successful of our burlesques upon 
Guy Fawkes; some were borne on litters by four men; 



o 



OS GREATER BRITAIN. 



others mounted on light carts and drawn by bullocks, 
while the i^ij^antic taboot of the Third Cavalry re- 
quired six buttaloos for its transport to the river. Many 
privates of our native infantry regiments had joined 
the procession in uniform, and it was as strange to me 
to see privates in our service engaged in howling round 
a sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with 
the tomtom, as it must have been to the English in 
Lucknow in 1857 to liear the bands of the rebel regi- 
ments playing ''Cheer, boys, cheer." 

Some of the troops in Poonali were kept within 
their lines all day, to be ready to suppress disturbances 
caused b}- the Moslem fanatics, who, excited by the 
Mohurrum, often run amuck among their Hindoo 
neighbors. In old times, quarrels between the Son- 
nites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting Mussul- 
mans, used to be added to those between Mohammed- 
ans and Hindoos at the season of the Mohurrum, but 
except upon the Afghan border these feuds have ail- 
but died out now. 

At the head of the procession marched a row of 
pipers, producing sounds of which no Highland regi- 
ment would have felt ashamed, followed by long- 
bearded, turban-wearing Marattas, on foot and horse- 
back, surrounding an immense pagoda-shaped taboot 
placed on a cart, and drawn by bullocks; boj'S swing- 
ing incense walked before and followed, and I remarked 
a gigantic cross — a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit 
College for this Mohammedan festivity. After each 
taboot there came a band of Hindoo "tigers" — men 
painted in thorough imitation of the jungle king, and 
wearing tiger ears and tails. Sometimes, instead of 
tigers, we had men painted in the colors worn by 
" sprites" in an English pantomime, and all — sprites 
and tigers — danced in the fashion of the medieval 



THE MOHUERUM. 309 

mummers. Behind the tigers and buffoons there fol- 
lowed women, walking in tlieir Holiest dress. The 
uautch girls of Poonah are reputed the best in all the 
East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch is not to be 
compared with the Cashmere nautch of Lahore. 

Some taboots were guarded on either side by sheiks 
on horseback, wearing turbans of the honorable green 
which denotes direct descent from the Prophet, though 
the genealogy is sometimes doubtful, as in the case of 
the Angel Gabriel, who, according to Mohammedan 
writers, wears a green turban, as being an ''honorary" 
descendant of Mohammed. 

Thousands of men and women thronged the road 
down which the taboots were forced to pass, or sat in 
the shade of the peepul trees until the taboot of their 
family or street came up, and then followed it, dancing 
and tomtom-beating like the rest. 

Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the 
elegance of their gait. In the hot weather, the saree 
is the sole garment of the Hindoo women, and lends 
grace to the form without concealing the outlines of 
the trunk or the comely shapes of the well-turned 
limbs. The saree is eight yards long, but of such soft 
thin texture that it makes no show upon the person. 
It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo 
habits, that at this Mohammedan festival the Moham- 
medan women should all be wearing the long seamless 
earee of the conquered Hindoos. 

In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was 
nothing distinctively Mohammedan. Hindoos joined 
in the festivities, and "Portuguese," or descendants of 
the slaves, half-castes, and native Christians who at the 
time of the Portuguese occupation of Surat assumed 
high-sounding names and titles, and now form a large 
proportion of the inhabitants of towns in the Bombay 



310 GREATER BRITAIN. 

Presidency. The temptation of a ten days' holiday is 
too great to be resisted by the prejudices of even the 
Christians or Hindoos. 

The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river- 
side, where the taboots, one after the other, made 
their exit from ten days of glory into unfathomable 
slush; and such was the number of the ^'camp ta- 
boots," as those of the native soldiers in our service 
are styled, and the ^' bazaar taboots," or city con- 
tributions, that the immersion ceremonies were not 
completed when the illumination and fireworks com- 
menced. 

After dark, the bazaar was lit with colored fires, 
and with the ghostly paper-lanterns that give no light; 
and the noise of tomtoms and fire-crackers recom- 
menced in spite of proclamations and police-rules. 
Were there in Indian streets anything to burn, the 
Mohurrum would cause as many fires in Hindostan as 
Independence-day in the United States; but, although 
houses are burnt out daily in the bazaars, they are 
never burnt down, for nothing but water can damage 
mud. We could have played our way into Lucknow 
in 1857 with pumps and hoses at least as fast as we 
contrived to batter a road into it with shot and shell. 

During the day I had been amused with the say- 
ings of some British recruits, who were watching the 
immersion ceremonies, but in the evening one of them 
was in the bazaar, uproariousl}- drunk, kicking every 
native against whom he stumbled, and shouting to an 
ofiicer of another regiment, who did not like to inter- 
fere: "I'm a private soldier, I know, but I'm a gentle- 
man ; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do; and I 
knows a cloud when I sees it, damned if I don't." On 
the other hand, in some fifty thousand natives holiday- 
making that day, many of them Christians and low- 



THE MOHURBUM. 311 

caste raen, with no prejudice against drink, a drunken 
man was not to be seen. 

It is impossible to overestimate the harm done to 
the English name in India by the conduct of drunken 
soldiers and "European loafers." The latter class con- 
sists chiefly of discharged railway guards and runaway 
sailors from Calcutta. — men who, traveling across 
India and living at free quarters on the trembling 
natives, become ruffianly beyond description from the 
effect upon their originally brutal natures of the pos- 
session of unusual power. 

The popularity of Mohammedan festivals such as 
that of the Mohurrum has been one of the many 
causes which have led us to believe that the Moham- 
medans form a considerable proportion of the popula- 
tion of Hindostan, but the census in the j^orthwest 
Provinces revealed the fact that they had there been 
popularly set down as three times as numerous as they 
are, and it is probable that the same is the case through- 
out all India. I^ot only are the Indian Mohammedans 
few, but their Mohammedanism sits lightly on them: 
thev are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in ceremonies, 
in daily life, and ail-but Hindoos in their actual wor- 
ship. On the other hand, this Mohurrum showed me 
that the Hindoos do not scruple to attend the com- 
.memoration of Hassan and Hoosein. At Benares there 
is a temple which is used in common by Mohammedans 
and Hindoos, and throughout India, among the low- 
caste people, there is now little distinction between 
the religious. The descendants of the Mohammedan 
conquerors, who form the leading families in several 
native States, and also in Oude itself, are among the 
most dangerous of our Indian subjects, but they ap- 
pear to have but little hold upon the humble classes 
of their fellow- worshipers, and their attempts to stir 



312 GREATER BRITAIN. 

up their people to active measures against the English 
have always foiled. On the other hand, we have 
hitherto somewhat ignored the claims upon our 
consideration of the Indian Mohammedans and still 
more nnmerous hill-tribes, and permitted our govern- 
ments to act as though the Hindoos and the Sikhs 
were the only inhabitants of Hindostan. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

EXGLISH LEARNING. 



The English traveler who crosses India from Cal- - 
cutta to Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condi- 
tion of the land. He has heard in England of palaces 
and temples, of art treasures and of native poetry, of 
the grace of the Hindoo maidens, of Cashmere shawls, 
of the Taj, of the Pearl Mosque, of a civilization as 
perfect as the European and as old as the Chinese., 
When he lands and surveys the people, he finds them, 
naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance: 
and superetition, and safe only from extermination be- 
cause the European cannot dwell permanently in the 
climate of their land. The stories we are told at home 
are in no sense false: — the Hindoos, of all classes, arej 
graceful in their carriage; their tombs and mosques 
are of extraordinary beauty, their art patterns the de- 
spair of our best craftsmen ; the native poetry is ati 
least equal to our own, and the Taj the noblest build- 
ing in the world. Every word is true, but the whole 
forms but a singularly small portion of the truth. The 



ENGLISH LEARNING. 313 

religious legends, the art patterns, the perfect manner 
and the graceful eye and taste seem to have descended 
to the Hindoos of to-day from a generation whose 
general civilization they have forgotten. The poetry 
is confined to a few members of a high- caste race, and 
is mainly an importation from abroad ; the architec- 
ture is that of the Moslem conquerors. Shan Jehan, 
a Mohammedan emperor and a- foreigner, built the 
Taj; Akbar the Great, another Turk, was the designer 
of the Pearl Mosque; and the Hindoos can no more be 
credited with the architecture of their early conquerors 
than they can with the railways and bridges of their 
English rulers, or with the waterworks of Bombay City. 
The Sikhs are chiefly foreigners; but of the purely 
native races, the Rajpoots are only fine barbarians, the 
Bengalees mere savages, and the tribes of Central In- 
dia but little better than the Australian aborigines or 
the brutes. Throughout India there are remains of an 
early civilization, but it has vanished as completely as 
it has in Egypt; and the Cave-temples stand as far 
from the daily life of Hindostan as the Pyramids do 
from that of Egypt. 

It is to be feared that the decline has been extremely 
rapid since the day when we arrived in India. Just as 
it is almost impossible, by any exertion of the mind, to 
realize in Mexico the fact that the present degraded 
Aztecs are the same people whom the Spaniards found, 
only some three hundred years ago, dwelling in splen- 
did palaces, and worshiping their unknown gods in 
golden temples through the medium of a sacred tongue, 
so now it is diflicult to believe that the pauperized in- 
habitants of Orissa and the miserable peasantry of Oude 
are the sons of the chivalrous warriors who fought in 
the last century against Clive. 

The truth is, that in surveying Oriental empires 

VOL. II. 21 



314 GEE ATE R BRITAIN. 

from a distance, we are dazzled bj the splendor of the 
kings and priests; drawing near, we lind an oppressed 
and miserable slave class, from whose hard earnings 
the wealth of the great is wrung; called on to govern 
the country, we extinguish the kings and priests in 
the fashion in which Captain Hodson, in 1857, shot 
the last sons of the Imperial family of India in a dry 
ditch, while we were transporting the last Mogul, 
along with our native thieves, in a convict-ship to 
British Burmah. There remains the slave class, and 
little else. We may select a few of these to be our 
policemen and torturers-in-chief, we may pick another 
handful to wear red coats and be our guards and the 
executioners of their countrymen ; we may teach a 
few to chatter some w^ords of English, and then, 
calling them great scoundrels, may set them in our 
railway stations and our offices ; but virtually, in an- 
nexing any Eastern country, we destroy the ruling 
class, and reduce the government to a mere imperial- 
ism, where one man rules and the rest are slaves. No 
parallel can be drawn in Europe or i^orth America to 
that state of things which exists wherever we carry 
our arms in the East: were the President and Congress 
in America, and all the wealthy merchants of the great 
towns, to be destroyed to-morrow, the next day would 
see the government proceeding quietly in the hands of 
another set every bit as intelligent, as wise, and good. 
In a lesser degree, the same would be the case in 
England or in France. The best example that could 
be given nearer home of that which occurs continually 
in the East would be one which would suppose that 
the Emperor and nobility in Russia were suddenly de- 
stroyed, and the country left in the hands of the British 
ambassador and the late serfs. Even this example 
would fail to convey a notion of the extent of the 



ENGLISH LEARNING. 315 

revolution which takes place on the conquest by 
Britain of an Eastern country; for in the East the 
nobles are better taught and the people more ignorant 
than they are in Russia, and the change causes a 
more complete destruction of poetry, of literature, 
and of art. 

It being admitted, then, that we are in the position 
of having, in Hindostan, a numerous and ignorant, 
but democratic people to govern from without, there 
comes the question of what should be the general 
character of our government. The immediate ques- 
tions of the day may be left to our subordinates in 
India; but the direction and the tendencies of legis- 
lation are matters for us at home. There can be 
nothirg more ridiculous than the position of those of 
our civilians in India who, while they treat the natives 
with profound contempt, are continually crying out 
against government from at home, on the ground set 
forth in the shibboleth of " India for the Indians." If 
Indif*. is to be governed by the British race at all, it 
must be governed from Great Britain. The general 
conditions of our rule must be dictated at London by 
the English people, and nothing but the execution of 
our decrees, the collection of evidence, and the framing 
of mere rules, left to our subordinates in the East. 

First among the reforms that must be introduced 
from London is the general instruction in the English 
language of the native population. Except upon a 
theory that will fairly admit of the forcing upon a 
not unwilling people af this first of all great means of 
civilization, our presence in India is wholly indefensi- 
ble. Unless also that be done, our presence in India, 
or that of some nation stronger than us and not more 
scrupulous, must endure forever; for it is plainly im- 
possible that a native government capable of holding 



316 GREATER BRITAIN. 

its own a2:ainst Russia and America can otherwise be 
built up in Hindostan. Upon the contrary supposi- 
tion, — namely, that we do not intend at any time to 
quit our hold on India, — the instruction of the people 
in our language becomes still more important. Upon 
the second theory, we must teach them English, the 
language of the British government; upon the first, 
English, the language of the world. Upon either 
theory, we must teach them English. JSTothing can 
better show the trivial character of the mnch-talked- 
of reforms introduced into India in the last few years, 
since our Queen has assumed the imperial throne of 
Hindostan, than the fact that no progress whatever 
has been made in a matter of far more grave import- 
ance than are any number of miles of railway, canal, 
or Grand Trunk roads. Our civilians in India tell us 
that, if you teach the natives English, yo\x expose 
them to the attacks of Christian missionaries, and us 
TO revolt — an exposure which speaks not too highly of 
the government which is forced to make it. Our mili- 
tary officers, naturally hating the country to which 
they now are exiled, instead of being sent as formerly 
of their own free will, tell you that every native who 
can speak English is a scoundrel, a liar, and a thief, 
which is, perhaps, if we except the Parsees, not far 
from true at present, when teaching is given only to 
a few lads, who thus acquire a monopoly of the offices 
in which mone^^ passes through native hands. Their 
opinion has no bearing whatever upon a general in- 
struction of the people, under which we should evi- 
dently be able to pick our men, as we now pick them 
for all employments in which a knowledge of English 
is not required 

A mere handful of Spaniards succeeded in natural 
izing their language in a countr}^ twice as large as 



ENGLISH LEARNING. 317 

Europe: in the whole of Sooth America, the Central 
States, and Mexico. Not only there, but in the United 
States, the Utes and Comanches, wild as they are, 
speak Spanish, while their own language is forgotten. 
In the west of Mexico there is no trace of pure Spanish, 
blood, there is even comparatively little mixture — yet 
Spanish, and that of the best, is spoken, to the ex- 
clusion of every other language, in Manzanillo and 
Acapulco. This phenomenon is not confined to the 
Western world. In Bombay Presidency, five millions 
of so-called Portuguese — who, however, for the most 
part are pure Hindoos — speak a Latin tongue, and 
worship at the temples of the Christian God. French 
makes progress in Saigon, Dutch in Java. In Canada, 
we find the Huron Indians French in language and 
religion. English alone, it would seem, cannot be 
pressed upon any of the dark-skinned tribes. In New 
Zealand, the Maories know no English; in Natal, the 
Zulus; in India, the Hindoos. The Dutch, finally ex- 
pelled from South Africa in 1815 and from Ceylon in 
1802, have yet more hold by their tongue upon the 
natives of those lands than have the English — masters 
of them since the Dutch expulsion. 

To the early abolition or total non-existence of 
slavery in the British colonies, we may, perhaps, trace 
our unfortunate failure to spread our mother-tongue. 
Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, all practiced a slavery 
of the widest kind; all had about them not native 
servants, frequently changing from the old master to 
the new, and passing unheeded to whatever service 
money could tempt them to engage in, but domestic 
slaves, bred up in the family, and destined, probably, 
to die within the house where they were reared, to 
whom the language of the master was taught, because 
your Spanish grandee, with power of life and death 

21* 



318 ORE ATE R BRITAIN, 

over liis family slaves, was not the man to condescend 
to learn his servants' tongue in order that his com- 
mands should he more readily understood. Another 
reason may have caused the Portuguese and other 
dominant races of the later middle ages to have in- 
sisted that their slaves should learn the language of 
the master and the government; namely, that in learn- 
ing the new, the servile families would speedily forget 
the older tongue, and thus become as incapable of 
mixing in the conspiracies and insurrections of their 
brother natives as Pyrenean shepherd dogs of con- 
sorting with their progenitors, the wolves. Whatever 
their reasons, however, the Spaniards succeeded where 
we have failed. 

The greatest of our difficulties are the financial. 
E'o cheap system is workable by us, and our dear sys- 
tem we have not the means to work. The success of 
our rule immediately depends upon the purity and good 
feeling of the rulers, yet there are villages in British 
India where the people have never seen a white man, 
and ofi' the main roads, and outside the district towns, 
the sight of a European official is extremely rare. 
To the inhabitants of the greater portion of rural 
India, the governor who symbolizes British rule is a 
cruel and corrupt Hindoo policeman; himself not im- 
probably a Bengal mutineer in 1857, or drawn from 
the classes whom our most ignorant sepoys themselves 
despised. It is not easy to see how this vital defect can 
be amended, except by the slow process of raising up 
a native population that we can trust and put in office, 
and this is impossible unless we encourage and reward 
the study of the English tongue. The most needed of 
all social reforms in India, an improvement in the pres- 
ent thoroughly servile condition of the native women, 
could itself in no way be more easily brought about 



ENGLISH LEARNING 319 

than by the familiarization of the Hindoos with Eng- 
lish literature; and that greatest of all the curses of 
India, false- swearing in the courts, would undoubtedly 
be both directly and indirectly checked by the intro- 
duction of our language. The spread of the English 
tongue need be no check to that of the ancient clas- 
sical languages of the East; the two studies would go 
hand in hand. It is already a disgrace to us that while 
we spend annually in India a large sum upon our chap- 
lains and church schools, we toss only one-hundredth 
part of the sum — a paltry few thousands of rupees — to 
the native colleges, where the most venerable of lan- 
guages — Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian — are taught by 
the men who alone can thoroughly understand them. 
At the moment when England, Germany, and America 
are struggling for the palm in the teaching of Oriental 
literature — when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are 
contending with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and 
Harvard, in translating and explaining Eastern books — 
our government in India is refusing the customary help 
to the publication of Sanscrit works, and starving the 
teachers of the lansruaore. 

So long as the natives remain ignorant of the 
English tongue, they remain ignorant of all the civil- 
ization of our time — ignorant alike of political and 
physical science, of philosophy and true learning. It 
is needless to say that, if French or German were 
taught them instead of English, they would be as 
well off in this respect; but English, as the tongue of 
the ruling race, has the vast advantage that its acqui- 
sition by the Hindoos will soon place the government 
of India in native hands, and thus, gradually relieving 
us of an almost intolerable burden, will civilize and 
set free the people of Hindostan. 



320 OREATER BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER XX. 

INDIA. 

"All general observations upon India are necessarily 
absurd," said to me at Simla a distinguished ofBeer of 
the Viceroy's government; but, although this is true 
enough of theories that bear upon the customs, social 
or religious, of the forty or fifty peoples which make 
up what in England we style the "Hindoo race," it has 
no bearing on the consideration of the policy which 
should guide our actual administration of the Empire. 

Eno'land in the East is not the Ensrland that we 
know. Flousy Britannia, with her anchor and ship, 
becomes a mysterious Oriental despotism, ruling a 
sixth of the human race, nominally for the natives' 
own good, and certainly for no one else's, by laws and 
in a manner opposed to every tradition and every pre- 
judice of the whole of the various tribes of w4iich this 
vast population is composed — scheming, annexing, 
out-manoeuvring Russia, and sometimes, it is to be 
feared, out-lying Persia herself. 

In our island home, we plume ourselves upon our 
hatred of political extraditions: we would scorn to ask 
the surrender of a political criminal of our own, we 
would die in the last ditch sooner than surrender those 
of another crown. What a contrast w^e find to this 
w^hen w^e look at our conduct in the East ! During the 
mutiny of 1857, some of our rebel subjects escaped 
into the Portuguese territory at Goa. We demanded 



INDIA. 321 

their extradition, which the Portuguese refused. We 
insisted. The offer we finally accepted was, that they 
should be transported to the Portuguese settlement at 
Timor, we supplying transports. An Indian trans- 
port conveying these men to their island grave, but 
carrying the British flag, touched at Batavia in 1858, 
to the astonishment of the honest Dutchmen, who 
knew England as a defender of national liberty in 
Europe. 

Although despotic, our government of India is not 
bad ; indeed, the hardest thing that can be said of it is 
that it is too good. We do our duty by the natives 
manfully, but they care little about that, and we are 
continually hurting their prejudices and offending 
them in small things, to which they attach more im- 
portance than they do to great. To conciliate the Hin- 
doos, we should spend £10,000 a year in support of 
native literature to please the learned, and £10,000 on 
fireworks to delight the wealthy and the low-caste peo- 
ple. Instead of this, we worry them with municipal 
institutions and benevolent inventions that they cannot 
and will not understand. The attempt to introduce 
trial by jury into certain parts of India was laudable, 
but it has ended in one of those failures which discredit 
the government in the eyes of its own subordinates. 
If there is a European foreman of jury, the natives 
salaam to him, and ask: '^What does the sahib say?" 
If not, they look across the court to the native barris- 
ters, who hold up fingers, each of which means lOOrs., 
and thus bid against each other for the verdict, for, 
while natives as a rule are honest in their personal or 
individual dealings, yet in places of trust— railway 
clerkships, secretaryships of departments, and so on — 
they are almost invariably willing to take bribes. 

Throughout India, such trials as are not before a 



322 GREATER BRITAIN. 

jury are conducted with the aid of native assessors as 
members of the court. This works ahnost as badly as 
the jury does, the judge giving his decision without 
any reference to the opinion of the assessors. The 
story runs that the only use of assessors is, that in an 
appeal — where the judge and assessors had agreed — 
the advocate can say that the judge " has abdicated his 
functions, and yielded to the absurd opinion of a couple 
of ignorant and dishonest natives," — or, if the judge 
had gone against his client in spite of the assessors 
being inclined the other way, that the judge "has de- 
cided in the teeth of all experienced and impartial na- 
tive opinion, as declared by the voices of two honest 
and intelligent assessors." 

Our introduction of juries is not an isolated instance 
of our somewhat blind love for "progress." If in the 
already-published portions of the civil code — for in- 
stance, the parts which relate to succession, testament- 
ary and intestate — 3'ou read in the illustrations York 
for Delhi, and Pimlico for Sultanpore, there is not a 
word to show that the *ode is meant for India, or for 
an Oriental race at all. It is true that the testamentary 
portion of the code applies at present only to European 
residents in India; but the advisability of extending it 
to natives is under consideration, and this extension 
is only a matter of time. The result of over-great 
rapidity of legislation, and of unyielding adherence to 
English or Roman models in the Indian codes, must be 
that our laws will never have the slightest hold upon 
the people, and that, if we are swept from India, our 
laws will vanish with us. The Western character of 
our codes, and their want of elasticity and of adapta- 
bility to Eastern conditions, is one among the many 
causes of our unpopularity. 

The old-school Hindoos fear that we aim at subvert- 



INDIA. 323 

ing all their dearest and most venerable institutions, 
and the free-thinkers of Calcutta and the educated na- 
tives hate us because, while we preach culture and 
progress, we give them no chance of any but a subordi- 
nate career. The discontent of the first named class 
we can gradually allay, by showing them the ground- 
lessness of their suspicions; but the shrewd Bengalee 
baboos are more difficult to deal with, and can be met 
only in one way — namely, by the employment of the 
natives in offices of high trust, under the security af- 
forded by the infliction of the most degrading penal- 
ties on proof of the smallest corruption. One of the 
points in which the policy of Akbar surpassed our own 
was in the association of qualified Hindoos with his 
Mohammedan fellow-countrymen in high places in his 
government. The fact, moreover, that native govern- 
ments are still preferred to British rule, is a strong ar- 
gument in favor of the employment by us of natives; 
for, roughly speaking, their governmental system dif- 
fers from ours only in the employment of native officers 
instead of English. There is not now existent a thor- 
oughly native government; at some time or other, we 
have controlled in a greater or less degree the govern- 
ments of all the native States. To stud}^ purely native 
rule, we should have to visit Caboul or Herat, and 
watch the Afghan princes putting out each other's 
eyes, while their people are engaged in never-ending 
wars, or in murdering strangere in the name of God. 

l^atives might more safely be employed to fill the 
higher than the lower offices. It is more easy to find 
honest and competent native governors or couneilmen 
than honest and efficient native clerks and policemen. 
Moreover, natives have more temptations to be corrupt, 
and more facilities for being so with safety, in low posi- 
tions than in high. A native policeman or telegraph 



324 OBEATER BRITAIN. 

official can take bis bribe witbout fear of detection by 
bis European cbief; not so a native governor, witb 
European subordinates about bim. 

Tbe common Anglo-Indian objections to tbe employ- 
ment of natives in our service are, when examined, 
found to apply only to tbe employment of incompetent 
natives. To say tbat tbe native lads of Bengal, edu- 
cated in our Calcutta colleges, are balf educated and 
grossly immoral, is to say tbat, under a proper system 
of selection of officers, tbey could never come to be 
employed. All tbat is necessary at tbe moment is that 
we should concede tbe principle by appointing, year 
by year, more natives to high posts, and that, by bold- 
ins: the civil service examinations in India as well as 
in England, and by establishing throughout India 
well-regulated schools, we should place the competent 
native youths upon an equal footing with the English. 

Tbat we shall ever come to be thoroughly popular 
in India is not to be expected. By tbe time tbe old 
ruling families have died out, or completely lost their 
power, the people whom we rescued from their oppres- 
sion will have forgotten that the oppression ever ex- 
isted, and as long as tbe old families last, tbey will 
bate us steadily. One of the documents published in 
tbe Gazette of India, while I was at Simla, was from the 
pen of Asudulla Mubamadi, one of the best-known 
Mohammedans of the ITorthwest Provinces. His griev- 
ances were the cessation of the practice of granting 
annuities to tbe "sheiks of noble families," the con- 
ferring of the " high offices of Mufti, Sudr'-Ameen, 
and Tahsildar," on persons not of *' noble extraction,'* 
" the education of the children of the higher and lower 
classes on the same footing, without distinction," "the 
desire that women should be treated like men in every 
respect," and ^*tbe formation of English schools for 



INDIA. 325 

the education of girls of the lower order." He ended 
his State paper by pointing out the ill effects of the 
practice of conferring on the poor " respectable berths, 
thereby enabling them to indulge in luxuries which 
their fathers never dreamt of, and to play the upstart;" 
and declared that to a time-honored system of class 
government there had succeeded *' a state of things 
which I cannot find words to express." It is not likely 
that our rule will ever have much hold on the class 
tliat Asudulla represents, for not only is our govern- 
ment in India a despotism, but its tendency is to 
become an imperialism, or despotism exercised over a 
democratic people, such as we see in France, and are 
commencing to see in Russia. 

We are leveling all ranks in India; we are raising 
the humblest men, if they will pass certain examina- 
tions, to posts which we refuse to the most exalted of 
nobles unless they can pass higher. A clever son of 
a bheestie, or sweeper, if he will learn English, not 
only may, but must rise to be a railway baboo, or 
deputy-collector of customs; whereas for Hindoo rajahs 
or Mohammedan nobles of Delhi creation, there is no 
chance of anything but gradual decline of fortune. 
Even our Star of India is democratic in its working: 
we refuse it to men of the highest descent, to confer it 
on self-made viziers of native States, or others who 
were shrewd enough to take our side during the 
rebellion. All this is very modern, and full of "prog- 
ress," no doubt; but it is progress toward imperialism, 
or equality of conditions under paternal despotism. 

Not only does the democratic character of our rule 
set the old families against us, but it leads also to the 
failure of our attempt to call around us a middle class, 
an educated thinking body of natives with something 
to lose, who, seeing that we are ruling India for her 
VOL. II. 28 



326 GREATER BRITAIN. 

own good, would support us heart and soul, and form 
the best of bucklers for our dominion. As it is, the 
attempt has long been made in name, but, as a matter 
of fact, we have humbled the upper class, and failed 
to raise a middle class to take its place. We have 
crushed the prince without setting up the trader in his 
stead. 

The wide-spread hatred of the English does not 
prove that they are bad rulers ; it is merely the hatred 
that Easterns always bear their masters; yet masters 
the Hindoos will have. Even the enlightened natives 
do not look with longing toward a future of self-govern- 
ment, however distant. Most intelligent Hindoos would 
like to see the Russians drive us out of India, not that 
any of them think that the Russians would be better 
rulers or kinder men, but merely for the pleasure of 
seeing their traditional oppressors beaten. What, then, 
are we to do? The only justitication for our presence 
in India is the education for freedom of the Indian 
races ; but at this moment they will not have freedom 
at a gift, and many Indian statesmen declare that no 
amount of education will ever fit them for it. For a 
score of centuries the Hindoos have bribed and taken 
bribes, and corruption has eaten into the national char- 
acter so deeply, that those w^ho are the best of judges 
declare that it can never be washed out. The analogy 
of the rise of other races leads us to hope, however, 
that the lapse of time will be sufficient to raise the 
Hindoos as it has raised the Huns. 

The ancients believed that the neighborhood of frost 
and snow w^as fatal to philosophy and to the arts; to 
the Carthaginians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, the in- 
habitants of Gaul, of Germany, and of Britain were 
rude barbarians of the frozen !N'orth, that no con- 
ceivable lapse of time could convert into anything 



INDIA. 327 

much better than talking bears — a piece of empiricism 
which has a close resemblance to our view of India. 
It is idle to point to the tropics and say that free com- 
munities do not exist within those limits: the map 
of the world will show that freedom exists only in the 
homes of the English race. France, the authoress of 
modern liberty, has failed as yet to learn how to retain 
the boon for which she is ever ready to shed her blood ; 
Switzerland, a so-called free State, is the home of the 
worst of bigotry and intolerance; the S[)ani8h re- 
publics are notoriously despotisms under democratic 
titles; America, Australia, Britain, the homes of our 
race, are as yet the only dwelling-spots of freedom. 

There is much exaggeration in the cry that self- 
government, personal independence, and true manli- 
ness can exist only where the snow will lie upon the 
ground, that cringing slavishness and imbecile sub- 
mission follow the palm-bell round the woi-ld. If free- 
dom be good in one country, it is good in all, for there 
is nothing in its essence which should limit it in time 
or place : the only question that is open for debate is 
whether freedom — an admitted good — is a benefit 
which, if once conferred upon the inhabitants of the 
tropics, will be maintained by them against invasion 
fcom abroad and rebellion from within ; if it be given bit 
by bit, each step being taken only when public opinion 
is fully prepared for its acceptance, there can be no 
fear that freedom will ever be resiorncd without a 
struggle. We should know that Sikhs, Kandians, 
Scindians, Marattas, have fought bravely enough for 
national independence to make it plain that they will 
struggle to the death for liberty as soon as they can be 
made to sec its worth. It will take years to efface the 
stain of a couple of hundred years of slavery in the 
negroes of America, and it may take scores of years to 



328 GREATER BRITAIN. 

heal the deeper sores of Ilindostan; but history teaches 
us to believe that the time will come wheu the Iiidiaus 
will be tit for freedom. 

Whether the future adveut of a better day for ludia 
be a fact or a dream, our presence in the country is 
justifiable. Were we to quit India, we must leave her 
to Kussia or to herself. If to Russia, the political 
shrewdness and commercial blindness of the IS^orthern 
Power would combine to make our pocket suiter by 
loss of money as much as would our dignity by so plain 
a confession of our impotence; while the unhappy 
Indians would discover that there exists a European 
nation capable of surpassing Eastern tyrants in cor- 
ruption by as much as it already exceeds them in dull 
Weight of leaden cruelty and oppression. If to her- 
self, unextinguishable anarchy would involve our East- 
ern trade and India's happiness in a hideous and lasting 
ruin. 

If we are to keep the country, we must consider 
gravely w^h ether it be possible properly to administer 
its affairs upon the present system — whether, for in- 
stance, the best supreme government for an Eastern 
empire be a body composed of a chief invariably re- 
moved from office just as he begins to understand his 
duty, and a council of worn-out Indian officers, the 
whole being placed in the remotest corner of Western 
Europe, for the sake of removing the government from 
the "pernicious influence of local prejudice." 

India is at this moment governed by the Indian 
Council at Westminster, who are responsible to no- 
body. The Secretary of State is responsible to Par- 
liament for a policy which he cannot control, and the 
Viceroy is a head-clerk. 

India can be governed in two ways; either in India 
or in London. Under the former plan, we should 



INDIA. 329 

leave the bureaucracy in India independent, preserving 
mcjrely some slight control at home — a control which 
should, of course, be purely parliamentary and Eng- 
lish; under the other plan — which is that to which it 
is to be hoped the people of England will command 
their representatives to adhere — India would be gov- 
erned from London by the English nation, in the inter- 
ests of humanity and civilization. Under either system, 
the Indian Council in London would be valuable as an 
advising body; but it does not follow, because the 
Council can advise, that therefore they can govern, and 
to delegate executive power to such a board is on the 
face of it absurd. 

Whatever the powers to be granted to the Indian 
Council, it is clear that the members should hold 
office for the space of only a few years. So rapid is 
the change that is now making a nation out of what 
was ten years ago but a continent inhabited by aii 
agglomeration of distinct tribes, that no Anglo-Indian 
who has left India for ten years is competent even to 
advise the rulers, much less himself to share in the 
ruling, of Ilindostan. The objection to the govern- 
ment of India by the Secretary of State is, that the 
tenant of the office changes frequently, and is generally 
ignorant of native feelings and of Indian affairs. The 
difficulty, however, which attends the introduction of a 
successful plan for the government of India from Lon- 
don is far from being irremovable, while the objection 
to the paternal government of India by a Viceroy is 
that it would be wholly opposed to our constitutional 
theories, unfitted to introduce into our Indian system 
those democratic principles which we have for ten 
years been striving to implant, and even in the lono* 
run dangerous to our liberties at home. 

One reason why the Indian officials cry out against 

28* 



330 GREATER BRITAIN. 

government from St. James's Park is, because they 
deprecate interference with the Viceroy ; but were the 
Council abolished, except as a consultative body, and 
the Indian Secretaryship of State made a permanent 
appointment, it is probable that the Viceroy would be 
relieved from that continual and minute interference 
with his acts which at present degrades his office in 
native eyes.. The Viceroy would be left considerable 
power, and certainly greater power than he has at 
present, by the Secretary of State; — that which is es- 
sential is merely, that the power of control, and re- 
sponsible control, should lie in London. The Viceroy 
would, in practice, exercise the executive functions, 
under the control of a Secretary of State, advised by 
an experienced Council and responsible to Parliament, 
and we should possess a system under which there 
would be that conjunction of personal responsibility 
and of skilled advice w^hich is absolutely required for 
the good government of India. 

To a scheme which involves the government of In- 
dia from at home, it may be objected that India can- 
not be so well understood in London as in Calcutta. 
So far from this being the case, there is but little doubt 
among those who best know the India of to-day, that 
while men in Calcutta understand the wants of the 
Bengalee, and men in Lahore the feelings of the Sikh, 
India, as a Avhole, is far better understood in England 
than in any presidency town. 

It must be remembered, that with India within a dav 
of England by telegraph, and within three weeks by 
steam, the old autocratic Governor-General has become 
impossible, and day by day the Secretary of State in 
London must become more and more the ruler of 
India. "Were the Secretary of State appointed for a 
term of years, and made immovable except by a direct 



INDIA. 331 

vote of the House of Commons, no fault could be 
found with the results of the inevitable change: as it 
is, however, a council of advice will hardly be suHi- 
cient to prevent gross blundering while we allow India 
to be ruled by no less than four Secretaries of State in 
a single year. 

The chief considerations to be kept in view in the 
framing of a system of government for India are briefly 
these: — a sufficient separation of the two countries to 
prevent the clashing of the democratic and paternal 
systems, but, at the same time, a control over the 
Indian administration by the English people active 
enough to insure the progressive amelioration of the 
former; the minor points to be borne in mind are that 
in India we need less centralization, in London more 
permanence, and, in both, increased personal responsi- 
bility. All these requirements are satisfied by the plan 
proposed, if it be coupled with the separation of the 
English and Indian armies, the employment of natives 
in our service, and the creation of new governments 
for the Indus territories and Assam. Madras, Bom- 
bay, Bengal, Assam, the Central Provinces, Agra, the 
Endus, Oude, and Burmah would form the nine presi- 
dencies, the Viceroy having the supreme control over 
our officers in the native States, and not only should 
the governors of the last seven be placed upon the 
same footing with those of Madras and Bombay, but 
all the local governors should be assisted by a council 
of ministers who should necessarily be consulted, but 
whose advice should not be binding on the governors. 
The objections that are raised against councils do not 
apply to councils that are confined to the giving of ad- 
vice, and the ministers are needed, if for no other pur- 
pose, at least to divide the labor of the Governor, for 
aU our Indian officials are at present overworked. 



332 OREATER BRITAIN, 

This is not the place for the suggestion of improve- 
ments in the details of Indian government. The 
statement that all general observations upon India are 
necessarily absurd is not more true of moral, social, 
educational, and religious aliairs than of mere govern- 
mental matters: *' regulation system" and " non-resru- 
Intiou system ;" " permanent settlement" and "thirty 
years' settlement;" native participation in govern- 
ment, or exclusion of natives — each of these courses 
may be good in one part of India and bad in another. 
On the whole, however, it may be admitted that our 
Indian government is the best example of a well- 
administered despotism, on a large scale, existing in 
the world. Its one great iault is over-centralization; 
for, although our rule in India must needs be despotic, 
no reason can be shown why its despotism should be 
minute. 

The greatest of the many changes in progress in the 
East is that India is being made — that a country is 
being created under that name w^here none has yet 
existed; and it is our railroads, our annexations, and 
above all our centralizing policy that are doing the 
work. There is reason to fear that this change will 
be hastened bj^ the extension of our i^ew codes to the 
former "non-regulation provinces," and by govern- 
ment from at home, where India is looked upon as 
one nation, instead of from Calcutta, wher^ it is known 
to be still composed of fifty ; but so rapid is the change, 
that already the Calcutta people are as miet^ken in at- 
tempting to laugh down our phrase "the people of 
India," as we were during the mutiny when we be- 
lieved that there w^as an "India" writhing in our 
clutches. Whether the India w^hich is being thus 
rapidly built up by our own hands will be fricrOly 
to us, or the reverse, depends upon ourselves. The 



DEPENDENCIES. 333 

two principles upon which our administration of the 
country might be based have long since been weighed 
against each other by the English people, who, reject- 
ing tlie principle of a holding of India for the acquisi- 
tion of prestige and trade, have decided that we are to 
govern India in the interest of the people of Ilindostan. 
We are now called on to deliberate once more, but 
this time upon the method by which our principle is 
to be worked out. That our administration is already 
perfect can hardly be contended so long as no officer 
not very high iu our Indian service dares to call a na- 
tive "friend." The first of all our cares must be the 
social treatment of the people, for while by the Queen's 
proclamation the natives are our fellow-subjects, they 
are in practice not yet treated as oar fellow-men. 



CHAPTER XXL 

DEPENDENCIES. 

When, on my way home to England, I found myself 
off Mocha, with the Abyssinian highlands in sight, and 
still more when we were off Massowah, with the peaks 
of Talanta plainly visible, I began to recall the accounts 
which I had heard at Aden of the proposed British 
colony on the Abyssinian table-lands, out of which the 
home government has since been frightened. The 
question of the desirability or the reverse of such a 
colony raises points of interest on which it would be 
advisable that people at home should at once take up 
a line. 



334 GREATER BRITAIN, 

As it has n.ever been assumed that Englishmen can 
dwell permanently even upon high hills under the 
equator, the proposition for European colonization or 
settlement of tropical Africa may be easily dismissed, 
but that for the annexation of tropical countries for 
trade purposes remains. It has hitherto been accepted 
as a general principle regulating our intercourse with 
Eastern nations, that we have a moral right to force 
the dark-skinned races to treat us in the same fashion 
as that in which we are treated by our European neigh- 
bors. In practice we even now go much further than 
this, and inflict the blessings of Free Trade upon the 
reluctant Chinese and Japanese at the cannon's mouth. 
It is hard to find any law but that of might whereby 
to justify our dealings with Burmah, China, and 
Japan. We are apt to wrap ourselves up in our new- 
found national morality, and, throwing npon our 
fathers all the blame of the ill which has been done 
in India, to take to ourselves credit for the good; but 
it is obvious to any one who watches the conduct of 
our admirals, consuls, and traders in the China seas, 
that it is inevitable that China should fall to us as India 
fell, unless there should be a singular change in opinion 
at home, or unless, indeed, the Americans should be 
beforehand with us in the matter. To say this, is not 
to settle the disputed question of whether in the pres- 
ent improved state of feeling, and with the present 
control exercised over our Eastern officials by a disin- 
terested press at home, and an interested but vigilant 
press in India and the Eastern ports, government of 
China by Britain might not be for the advantage of 
the Chinese and the world, but it is at least open to 
serious doubt whether it would be to the advantage of 
Great Britain. Our ruling classes are already at least 
sufficiently exposed to the corrupting influences of 



DEPENDENCIES. 335 

power for us to hesitate before we decide that the 
widening of the national mind consequent upon the 
acquisition of the government of China would out- 
weigh the danger of a spread at home of love of abso- 
lute authority, and indifference to human happinesa 
and life. The Americans, also, it is to be hoped, will 
pause before they expose republicanism to the shock 
that would be caused by the annexation of despotically- 
governed States. In defending the Japanese against 
our assaults, and those of the active but unsuccessful 
French, they may unhappily find, as we have often 
found, that protection and annexation are two words 
for the same thing. 

Although the disadvantages are more evident than 
the advantages of the annexation for commercial pur- 
poses of such countries as Abyssinia, China, and Japan, 
the benefits are neither few nor hard to find. The 
abstract injustice of annexation cannot be said to exist 
in the cases of Afghanistan and Abyssinia, as the sen- 
timent of nationality clearly has no existence there, and 
as the worst possible form of British government is 
better for the mass of the people than the best con- 
ceivable rule of an Abyssinian chief. The dangers of 
annexation in the weakening and corrupting of our- 
selves may not unfairly be set off against the blessings 
of annexation to the people, and the most serious ques- 
tion for consideration is that of whether dependencies 
can be said '' to pay." Social progress is necessary to 
trade, and we give to mankind the powerful security 
of self-interest that we will raise the condition of the 
people, and, by means of improved communications, 
open the door to civilization. 

It may be objected to this statement that our exag- 
gerated conscientiousness is the very reason why our 
dependencies commercially are failures, and why it ia 



336 GREATER BRITAIN. 

useless for us to be totaling up our loss and profits 
while we willful Iv throw away the advantages that our 
energy has placed in our hands. If India paid as well 
as Java, it may be shown, we should be receiving from 
the East 60 millions sterling a year for the support of 
our European ofiicials in Ilindostan, and the total reve- 
nue of India would be 200 or 250 millions, of which 80 
millions would be clear protit for our use in England; 
in other w^ords, Indian profits would relieve us from 
all taxation in England, and leave us a. considerable 
and increasing margin toward the abolition of the 
debt. The Dutch, too, tell us that their system is more 
agreeable to the natives than our own clumsy though 
well-meant eflbrts for the improvement of their condi- 
tion, which, although not true, is far too near the truth 
to allow us to rest in our complacency. 

The Dutch system having been well weighed at 
home, and deliberately rejected by the English people 
as tending to the degradation of the natives, the ques- 
tion remains how far dependencies from which no 
profits are exacted may be advantageously retained for 
mere trade purposes. At this moment, our most flour- 
ishing dependencies do not bear so much as their fiiir 
share of the expenses of the empire: — Ceylon herself 
pays only the nominal and not the real cost of her de- 
fense, and Mauritius costs nominally <£150,000 a year, 
and above half a million really in military expenses, of 
which the colony is ordered to pay X45,000 and grum- 
bles much at paying it. India herself, although charged 
with a share of the non-eti:ective expenses of our army, 
escapes scot-free in war-time, and it is to be remarked 
that the throwing upon her of a small portion of the 
cost of the Abyssinian war was defended upon every 
ground except the true one — namely, that as an inte- 
gral part of the empire she ought to bear her share in/ 



DEPENDENCIES. 337 

imperial wars. It is true that, to make the constitu- 
tional doctrine hold, she also ought to be consulted, 
and that we have no possible machinery for consulting 
her — a consideration which of itself shows our Indian 
government in its true light. 

Whether, indeed, dependencies pay or do not pay 
their actual cost, their retention stands on a wholly dif- 
ferent footing from that of colonies. Were we to leave 
Australia or the Cape, we should continue to be the 
chief customers of those countries : were we to leave 
India or Ceylon, they would have no customers at all; 
for, falling into anarchy, they would cease at once to 
export their goods to us and to consume our manufac- 
tures. When a British Governor of I^ew Zealand wrote 
that of every Maori who fell in war with us it might 
be said that, "from his ignorance, a man had been de- 
stroyed whom a few months' enlightenment would 
have rendered a valuable consumer of British manu- 
factured goods," he only set forth with grotesque sim- 
plicity considerations which weigh with us all; but 
while the advance of trade may continue to be our 
chief excuse, it need not be our sole excuse for our 
Eastern dealings — even for use toward ourselves. 
Without repeating that which I have said with respect 
to India, we maj^ especially bear in mind that, although 
the theory has sufleredfrom exaggeration, our depend- 
encies still form a nursery of statesmen and of war- 
riors, and that we should irresistibly fall into national 
sluggishness of thought, were it not for the world-w^ide 
interests given us by the necessity of governing and 
educating the inhabitants of so vast an empire as our 
own. 

One of the last of our annexations was close upon 
our bow as we passed on our way from Aden up the 
Red Sea. The French are always angry when we 
VOL. II. 29 



338 GREATER BRITAIN. 

seize on places in the East, but it is hardly wonderful 
that they should have been perplexed about Perim. 
This island stands in the narrowest place in the sea, in 
the middle of the deep water, and the Suez Canal 
being a French work, and Egypt under French influ- 
ence, our possession of Perim becomes especially un- 
pleasant to our neighbors. Kot only this, but the 
French had determined themselves to seize it, and 
their fleet, bound to Perim, put in to Aden to coal. 
The Governor had his suspicions, and, having asked 
the French admiral to dinner, gave him unexception- 
able champagne. The old gentleman soon began to 
talk, and directly he mentioned Perim, the Governor 
sent a pencil-note to the harbor-master to delay the 
coaling of the ships, and one to the commander of a 
gunboat to embark as many artillerymen and guns as 
he could get on board in two hours, and sail for Perim. 
When the French reached the anchorage next day, 
they found the British flag flying, and a great show of 
guns in position. Whether they put into Aden on their 
way back to France, history does not say. 

Perim is not the only island that lies directly in the 
shortest course for ships, nor are the rocks the only 
dangers of the Red Sea. One night about nine o'clock, 
when we were oflp the port of Mecca, I was sitting on 
the fo' castle, right forward, almost on the sprit, to 
catch what breeze we made, when I saw two country 
boats about 150 yards on the starboard bow. Our 
three lights were so bright that I thought we must be 
seen, but as the boats came on across our bows, I gave 
a shout, which was instantly followed by " hard a-port !" 
from the Chinaman on the bridge, and by a hundred 
yells from the suddenly awakened boatmen. Our helm 
luckily enough had no time to act upon the ship. I 
threw myself down under a stancheon, and the sail 



FRANCE IN THE EAST. 339 

and yard of the leading boat fell on our deck close to 
my head, and the boats shot past us amid shouts of 
*'fire," caused by the ringing of the alarm-bell. When 
we had stopped the ship, the question came — had we 
sunk the boat ? We at once piped away the gig, with 
a Malay crew, and sent it off' to look for the poor 
wretches — but after half an hour, we found them our- 
selves, and found them safe except for their loss of 
canvas and their terrible fright. Our pilot questioned 
them in Arabic, and discovered that each boat had on 
board 100 pilgrims ; but they excused themselves for 
not having a watch or light, by saying that they had 
not seen us! Between rocks and pilgrim-boats. Red 
Sea navigation is hard enough for steamers, and it is 
easy to see which way its diflS.culties will cause the 
scale to turn when the question lies between Euphrates 
Railway and Suez Canal. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

FRANCE IN THE EAST. 

It is no longer possible to see the Pyramids or even 
Heliopolis in the solitary and solemn fashion in which 
they should be approached. English *' going out" and 
"coming home" are there at all days and hours, and 
the hundreds of Arabs selling German coins and 
iixummies of English manufacture are terribly out of 
place upon the desert. I went alone to see the Sphinx, 
and, sitting down on the sand, tried my best to read 
the riddle of the face, and to look through the rude 



340 GEE ATE B BRITAIN. 

carving into the inner mystery; but it would not do, 
and I came away bitterly disappointed. In this modern 
democratic railway-girt world of ours, the ancient has 
no place; the huge Pyramids may remain forever, but 
we can no longer read them. A few months may see 
a cafe chaniant at their base. 

Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and 
degradation hangs over the whole town, and clings to 
its people, from the donkey-boys and comfit-sellers to 
the pipe-smoking soldiers and the money-changers who 
squat behind their trays. The wretched fellaheen, or 
Egyptian peasantry, are apparently the most miserable 
of human beings, and their slouching shamble is a 
sad sight after the superb gait of the Hindoos. The 
slave-market of Cairo has done its work; indeed, it is 
astonishing that the English should content themselves 
with a treaty in which the abolition of slavery in 
Egypt is decreed, and not take a single step to 
secure its execution, while the slave-market in Cairo 
continues to be ail-but open to the passer. That the 
Egyptian government could put down slavery if it 
had the will, cannot be doubted by those who have 
witnessed the rapidity with which its officers act in 
visiting doubtful crimes upon the wrong men. During 
ray week's stay in Alexandria, two such cases came to 
my notice : — in the first, one of my fellow-passengers 
unwittingly insulted two of the Albanian police, and 
was shot at by one of them with a long pistol. A 
number of Englishmen, gathering from the public 
gaming-houses on the great square, rescued him, and 
beat ofi' the cavasses, and the next morning marched 
down to their Consulate and demanded justice. Our 
acting Consul went straight to the head of the police, 
laid the case before him, and procured the condemna- 
tion of the man who shot to the gaJeys for ten years. 



FRANCE IN THE EAST. 341 

while the policeman who had looked on was imme- 
diately bastinadoed in the presence of the passenger. 
The other case was one of robbery at a desert village, 
from the tent of an English traveler. When he com- 
plained to the sheik, the order was given to bastinado 
the head men and hold them responsible for the amount. 
The head men in turn gave the stick to the house- 
holders, and claimed the sum from them ; while these 
bastinadoed the vagrants, and actually obtained from 
them the money. Every male inhabitant having thus 
received the stick, it is probable that the actual culprit 
was reached, if, indeed, he lived within the village. 
*' Stick-backsheesh" is a great institution in Egypt, 
but the Turks are not far behind. When the British 
Consulate at Bussorah was attacked by thieves some 
years ago, our Consul telegraphed the fact to the 
Pacha of Bagdad. The answer came at once : — " Basti- 
nado forty men" — and bastinadoed they were, as soon 
as they had been selected at random from the popu- 
lation. 

Coming to Egypt from India, the Englishman is 
mclined to believe that, while our Indian government 
is an averagely successful despotism, Egypt is mis- 
governed in an extraordinary degree. As a matter of 
fact, however, it is not fair to the King of Egypt that 
we should compare his rule with ours in India, and it 
is probable that his government is not on the whole 
worse than Eastern despotisms always are. Setting up 
as a "civilized ruler," the King of Egypt performs the 
duties of his position by buying guns which he uses 
in putting down insurrections which he has fomented, 
and yachts for which he has no use; and he appears to 
think that he has done all that Peter of Russia him- 
self could have accomplished, when he sends a young 
Egyptian to Manchester to learn the cotton-trade, or to 

29* 



3i2 GREATER BRITAIN. 

London to acquire the principles of foreign commerce, 
and, on his return to Alexandria, sets him to manage 
the soap-works or to conduct the viceregal band. The 
aping of the forms of ^'Western civilization," which in 
Egypt means French vice, makes the Court of Alexan- 
dria look worse than it is: — we expect the slave-market 
and the harem in the East, but the King of Egypt 
superadds the Trianon, and a bad imitation of Mabile. 

The Court influence shows itself in the action of 
the people, or rather the influence at work upon the 
Court is pressing also upon the people. For knavery, 
no place can touch the modern Alexandria. One 
word, however, is far from describing all the infamies 
of the city. It surpasses Cologne for smells, Benares 
for pests, Saratoga for gaming, Paris itself for vice. 
There is a layer of French " civilization " of the 
worst kind over the semi-barbarism of Cairo; but 
still the town is chiefly Oriental. Alexandria, on the 
other hand, is completely Europeanized, and has a 
white population of seventy or eighty thousand. The 
Arabs are kept in a huge village outside the fortifica- 
tions, and French is the only language spoken in the 
shops and hotels. Alexandria is a French town. 

It is evident enough that the Suez Canal scheme has 
been from the beginning a blind for the occupation of 
Egypt by France, and that, however interesting to the 
shareholders may be the question of its physical or 
commercial success, the probabilities of failure have 
had but little weight with the French government. 
The foundation of the Messagerie Company with na- 
tional capital, to carry imaginary mails, secured the 
preponderance of French influence in the towns of 
Egypt, and it is not certain that we should not look 
upon the occupation of Saigon itself as a mere blind. 

Of the temporary success of the French policy there 



FRANCE IN THE EAST. Mo 

can be no doubt ; the English r airway-guards have 
lately been dismissed from the government railway 
line, and a huge tricolor floats from the entrance to 
the new docks at Suez, while a still more gigantic one 
waves over the hotel ; the King of Egypt, glad to lind 
a third Power which he can play oft", when necessary, 
against both England and Russia, takes shares in the 
canal. It is when we ask, "What is the end that the 
French have in view?" that we find it strangely small 
by the side of the means. The French of the present 
day appear to have no foreign policy, unless it is a sort 
of desire to extend the empire of their language, their 
dance-tunes, and their fashions ; and the natural wish 
of their ruler to engage in no enterprise that will out- 
last his life prevents their having any such permanent 
policy as that of Russia or the United States. An 
Egyptian Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly 
when he said, " There is nothing permanent about 
France except Mabile." 

The Suez Canal is being pushed with vigor, although 
the labor of the hundreds of Greek and Italian navvies 
is very difllerent to that of the tens of thousands of im- 
pressed fellaheen. The withdrawal from the Com- 
pany of the forced labor of the peasants has demon- 
strated that the King is at heart not well disposed 
toward the scheme, for the remonstrances of Enghmd 
have never prevented the employment of slave labor 
upon works out of which there was money to be made 
for the viceregal purse. The difficulty of clearing and 
keeping clear the channel at Port Said, at the Medi- 
terranean end, is well known to the Pacha and his 
engineers : — it is not difficult, indeed, to cut through 
the bar, nor impossible to keep the cutting open, but 
the efiect of the great piers will merely be to push the 
Nile silt farther seaward, and again and again new 



344 GREATER BRITAIN. 

ba,rs will form in front of the canal. That the canal 
IS physically possible no one doubts, but it is hard to 
believe that it can pay. Even if we suppose, more- 
over, that the canal will prove a complete success, the 
French government will only find that it has spent 
millions upon digging a canal for England's use. 

The neutralization of Egypt has lately been pro- 
posed by writers of the Comtist school, but to what 
end is far from clear. *'The interests of civilization" 
are the pretext, but, when summoned by a Comtist, 
"civilization" and "humanity" generally appear in a 
French shape. Were we to be attacked in India by 
the French or Russians, no neutralization would pre- 
vent our sending our troops to India by the shortest 
road, and fighting wherever we thought best. If we 
were not so attacked, neutralization, as far as we are 
concerned, would be a useless ceremony. If France 
goes beyond her customary meddlesomeness and set- 
tles down in Egypt, we shall evidently have to dislodge 
her, but to neutralize the country would be to settle 
her there ourselves. It would be idle to deny that the 
position of France in the East is connected with the 
claim put forth by her to the moral leadership of the 
world. The " chief power of Europe" and "leader of 
Christendom" must needs be impatient of the domi- 
nance of America in the Pacific and of Britain in the 
East, and seeks by successes on the side of India to 
bury the memories of Mexico. One of the hundred 
"missions of France," one of the thousand " Imperial 
ideas," is the " regeneration of the East." Treacherous 
England is to be confined to her single island, and bar- 
barous Russia to be shut up in the Siberian snows. 
England may be left to answer for herself, but before 
we surrender even Russia to the Comtist priests, we 
should remember that, just as the Russian despotism 



FRANCE IN THE EAST. 345 

is dangerous to the world from the stupidity of its bar- 
barism, so the French democracy is dangerous through 
its feverish sympathies, blundering " humanity," and 
unlimited ambition. 

The present reaction against exaggerated national- 
ism is in itself a sign that our national mind is in a 
healthy state ; but, while we distrust nationalism be- 
cause it is illogical and narrow, we must remember 
that '^ cosmopolitanism" has been made the excuse for 
childish absurdities, and a cloak for desperate schemes. 
Love of race, among the English, rests upon a firmer 
base than either love of mankind or love of Britain, 
for it reposes upon a subsoil of things known : the 
ascertained virtues and powers of the English people. 
For nations such as France and Spain, with few cares 
outside their European territories, national fields for 
action are, perhaps, too narrow, and the interests of 
even the vast territories inhabited by the English race 
may, in a less degree, be too small for English thought ; 
but there is India, — and the responsibility of the abso- 
lute government of a quarter of the human race is no 
small thing. If we strive to advance ourselves in the 
love of truth, to act justly towards Ireland, and to 
govern India aright, we shall have enough of work to 
occupy us for many years to come, and shall leave a 
greater name in history than if we concerned ourselves 
with settling the aftairs of Poland. If we need a wider 
range for our sympathies than that which even India 
will supply, we may find it in our friendships with the 
other sections of the race; and if, unhappily, one re- 
sult of the present awakening of England to free life 
should be a return of the desire to meddle in the afiairs 
of other folk, we shall find a better outlet for our en- 
ergy in aiding our Teutonic brethren in their struggle 
for unity than in assisting Imperial France to spread 
Benoitonisme through the world. « 



346 GBEATER BRITAIN. 

We cannot, if we would, be indifferent spectators of 
the extravagances of France: if she is at present weak 
in the East, she is strong at home. At this moment, 
we are spending ten or fifteen millions a year in order 
that we may be equal with her in military force, and 
we hang upon the words of her ruler to know whether 
we are to have peace or war. Although it may not be 
wise for us to declare that this humiliating spectacle 
shall shortly have an end, it is at least advisable that 
we should refrain from aiding the French in their pro- 
fessed endeavors to obtain for other peoples liberties 
which they are incapable of preserving for themseh^es. 

If the English race has a "mission" in the world, 
it is the making it impossible that the peace of man- 
kind on earth should depend upon the will of a single 
man. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 



THE ENGLISH. 



In America we have seen the struggle of the dear 
races against the cheap — the endeavors of the Euglish 
to hold their own against the Irish and Chinese. In 
New Zealand, we found the stronger and more ener- 
getic race pushing from the earth the shrewd and labo- 
rious descendants of the Asian Malays; in Australia, 
the English triumphant, and the cheaper races excluded 
from the soil not by distance merely, but by arbitrary 
legislation; in India, we saw the solution of the prob- 
lem of the officering of the cheaper by the dearer race. 
Everywhere we have found that the difficulties which 



THE ENGLISH. 347 

impede the progress to universal dominion of the Eng- 
lish people lie in the conflict with the cheaper races. 
The result of our survey is such as to give us reason 
for the belief that race distinctions will long continue, 
that miscegenation will go but little way toward blend- 
ing races ; that the dearer are, on the whole, likely to 
destroy the cheaper peoples, and that Saxondom will 
rise triumphant from the doubtful struggle. 

The countries ruled by a race whose very scum and 
outcasts have founded empires in every portion of the 
globe, even now consist of 9J millions of square miles, 
and contain a population of 300 millions of people. 
Their surface is five times as great as that of the em- 
pire of Darius, and four and a half times a^ large as 
the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. It is no ex- 
aggeration to say that in power the English countries 
would be more than a match for the remaining nations 
of the world, whom in the intelligence of their people 
and the extent and wealth of their dominions they al- 
ready considerably surpass. Russia gains ground stead- 
ily, we are told, but so do we. If we take maps of the 
English-governed countries and of the Russian coun- 
tries of fifty years ago, and compare them with the 
English and Russian countries of to-day, we find that 
the Saxon has outstripped the Muscovite in conquest 
and in colonization. The extensions of the United 
States alone are equal to all those of Russia. Chili, 
La Plata, and Peru must eventually become English; 
the Red Indian race that now occupies those countries 
cannot stand against our colonists; and the future of 
the table-lands of Africa and that of Japan and of China 
is as clear. Even in the tropical plains, the negroes 
alone seem able to withstand us. I^o possible series 
of events can prevent the English race itself in 1970 
numbering 300 millions of beings — of one national 



348 GREATER BRITAIN. 

character and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Rus- 
sia become pigmies by the side of such a people. 

Many who are well aware of the power of the Eng- 
lish nations are nevertheless disposed to believe that 
our own is morally, as well as physically, the least 
powerful of the sections of the race, or, in other words, 
that we are overshadowed by America and Australia. 
The rise to power of our southern colonies is, however, 
distant, and an alliance between ourselves and America 
is still one to be made on equal terms. Although we 
are forced to contemplate the speedy loss of our manu- 
facturing supremacy as coal becomes cheaper in 
America and dearer in Old England, we have never- 
theless as much to bestow on America as she has to 
confer on us. The possession of India offers to our- 
selves that element of vastness of dominion which, in 
this age, is needed to secure width of thought and no- 
bility "of purpose; but to the English race our posses- 
sion'^of India, of the coasts of Africa, and of the ports of 
China offers the possibility of planting free institutions 
among the dark-skinned races of the world.^ 

The ultimate future of any one section of our race, 
however, is of little moment by the side of its triumph 
as a whole, but the power of English laws and English 
principles of government is not merely an English 
question— its continuance is essential to the freedom 
of mankind. 

Steaming up from Alexandria along the coasts of 
Crete and Arcadia, and through the Ionian Archipel- 
ago, I reached Brindisi, and thence passed on through 
Milan toward home. This is the route that our Indian 
mails should take until the Euphrates road is made. 



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